One–Stringed Harp
by Feonyx
Summary: Finale: Astrid fires the Bow of Falling Stars on the Apostle, Gatrie pretends to be a lion, reinforcements are called on from unexpected directions, traitors fail to die, Soren is brilliant, and the One–Stringed Harp sings out before a dance of farewell..
1. Out Of Their Hands

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter One: Out Of Their Hands**

"Just _try_ it, will you?" Calill insisted, pushing Nephenee back behind the standing screen again. "Honestly, I should not have to fence off the area just to get you to put on something that isn't full of armor plating. That is a finely hand-woven dress from one of the Begnion capital's best-reputed laceries."

"Whaddaya expect?" Nephenee protested, staring at the garment. "Handin' me somethin' like this outta the blue. 'Least I know what all the parts of a hauberk are _for_. This part's got springs in – listen." She twisted some bit of garb and let the rubbery-shrill squeak of metal do the talking. _Sqreyk._

Calill, ever the bustling urbanite, swept around the main room of her apartment, drawing open the blinds on her giant windows as she went. The chain of suddenly unbarred sunbeams illuminated the white stone walls as perfectly as she had been able to orchestrate, and when the last one rose it revealed Lucia, settled comfortably in the wide window-frame where the light could strike her with the most artistic contrast. Nothing was allowed to happen in Calill's home without being saturated with style.

Still, the sage was surprised by Lucia's sudden appearance, and showed it with a mildly irritated eyebrow. "What are you doing in there?"

"I was enjoying the solitude," the swordmaster replied.

"Overrated," Nephenee called from behind the screen. "Plenty of solitude back here and it ain't doing nothing for my state of mind." _Sqreyk-sqreyk._ "D'you really expect me to put this on?"

"Astrid would be terribly disappointed if you didn't," Calill said, managing to bustle without actually doing much of anything. As she had explained before, in the strictest confidence, a truly sophisticated city-dweller always, the very least, _looked_ like she was in a great rush.

"I think Astrid would be terribly disappointed if Nephenee arrived wearing silk carved from diamonds and invited along her friend the Goddess," Lucia stated flatly. "This marriage is _not_ what she wants, I guarantee it."

"Have you heard from her?" Calill asked, passing through briefly on her way from the kitchen to the study and back again. She was always hard to keep track of for a few hours after a long shopping spree. "I haven't received a word since she left Lord Ike's command. Except for the invitation to the wedding, of course, but that would have come to me no matter what, upper-class socialite that I am."

"No, I haven't," Lucia replied, letting the 'socialite' boast alone despite her desperate urge to perforate it. "But I did speak to her back then, at least, and I heard the occasional whisper. Well. When Gatrie whispers, some people suffer permanent damage. But if I knew one thing about her, it was that she didn't want to return home and get married off in some random betrothal."

"And the apple trick," Nephenee called.

"Okay, two things," Lucia agreed. "No betrothal; apple trick. I never said we were best friends."

"That's unfortunate, then, but at least when it's over she'll be able to settle into a proper city life. I mean, gallivanting about in time of war is one thing, but a military career for someone like her? It's a waste. Just you wait. Begnion's social circles are in for a dazzling surprise from her," said Calill.

A knock at the door turned out to be Mia, looking somewhat baffled as to why in the name of all holy things she had been invited to the home of Calill, a woman sufficiently unlike Mia that a mere handshake between them was risking mutual annihilation in a catastrophic matter-antimatter reaction. Lucia watched on the edge of amusement as the sage hauled Mia inside cheerfully and bustled her away into another room.

"Still orange all over? With your hair? By the Goddess, even if Astrid weren't to be married this week, fixing you up is a matter of civic duty," Calill stated.

"Uh, hi. Have we met? I'm Mia," said the myrmidon, as close to nervous as she ever got.

"Calill, of course – we were both under Lord Ike's command during that unpleasantness last year – just come this way."

"I _thought_ you looked familiar…" was all Lucia caught of Mia's response before the door shut. She had a few moment's peace, and used them to soak in all the morning light she could. Begnion's skies were a breathtaking clear blue this day, the perfect backdrop to the white-gold sun, and such a sight had never failed to raise the swordmaster's spirits.

And then Calill was back, shouting a last bit of advice to Mia before closing the door. "She recognised _you_," the sage said accusationally.

"We work together every week," Lucia reminded her. "You'll recall that we're both Crimean soldiers specialising in the same type of combat?"

"Oh. Right," Calill agreed, frowning. "…How on earth could you possibly let that fashion atrocity continue? I thought you knew better than that."

"I'm trying to remember how we got to be friends," Lucia said, cheerfully ignoring the question.

"We're the only beorc women under Lord Ike's command not completely wrapped up in ourselves," said Calill, somehow keeping a straight face. Lucia waited for the shattering crash of thunder that a just universe would have created in response to such a ridiculously huge self-delusion, but none came.

Eventually, let down by the nature of reality yet again, Lucia had to speak up. "So have you invited _every_ female soldier you know to come by here and be involuntarily made over?"

"Only the ones with no personal knack for it," Calill replied smoothly before rapping on the screen. "How are you faring back there, Nephenee?"

"I can't breathe in 'less I put my arms over my head, fold my neck, an' bend my knees," the soldier replied.

"That's how you know you're the height of style, dear; come on out and let me see."

Lucia sighed and turned back to look out the window. How Calill had managed to wrangle her way into owning this apartment, she couldn't imagine, but between the adjacent palace garden and the perfect blue sky was an endless sea of rooftops and parapets, all very striking. Somewhere out there, one of them was probably the city home of Astrid's family, though where the former bow-knight was, Lucia had never discovered.

"I hope you're enjoying this as much as she is, Astrid," Lucia murmured.

* * *

On a scale measuring enjoyment-of-preparations-for-the-wedding-of-Astrid-of-House-Ceffylau, where Calill sat at the upper limit and the lower was represented by Mia – currently trying to work out which limb was supposed to be adorned with which frilly thing, although she guessed that in a proper fight it wouldn't matter – Astrid had the most in common with a hole in the ground so deep that anyone who survived the passage through the planet core and emerged at the other end would find themselves immediately kicked to death by startled kangaroos.

That is to say, she was not enjoying it.

After returning home, adorned with badges of valour and the commendation of the Apostle herself, Astrid had clearly and without hesitation stated to her parents that she was no longer willing to take their every whim as law. She would henceforth be her own person, make her own decisions, and absolutely not get married just to complete some kind of foolish noble alliance in the eternal struggle for power.

Exactly what had happened over the last few months was still not clear to her.

The result, however, was plain enough, and drove her mad. "War? I mean, really, _war?_ That is what my parents consider a prod in the proper direction?" Astrid demanded of her maid, who desperately wanted to run, but couldn't until ordered.

"It would only be if milady didn't go through with the wedding…" the maid offered.

"Yes, and that is precisely the foolishness of it! Whatever little agreement they had before I left was one thing, but now they've drawn up this new contract that says my _fiancé_'s family is duty-bound to declare war against ours if the betrothal is broken! What kind of–" Astrid was cut off.

"If you please, milady, don't start with that sort of language again, you know it makes the housekeepers faint. What sort of company you were keeping that taught you such terms, I don't want to imagine," said the maid.

"Her name was Jill," said the paladin, recalling memories of her year of freedom. Where Astrid had her famous apple trick, Jill the wyvern rider occasionally showed off her ability to sharpen blades with nothing but a carefully selected torrent of profanity.

"_Astriiid!_" That was her mother, whose education, no matter how complete, would still have not prepared her to spell any of the words Astrid was considering replying with. "Aren't you ready yet, dear? They're coming up High Street now!"

The tone of her mother's voice caused Astrid to stop dead in her tracks and pause while her mind completely altered course. What 'they' could possibly be relevant to any of these blasted betrothal processes who hadn't already arrived? She turned sharply to ask the maid, but her expression – 'I desperately want a large shield and a full suit of titanium plate armor' – was all the confirmation Astrid needed.

Casting aside the last jangling accessories, Astrid strode out of the room, down two sets of spiral stairs, along the corridor, around another twisting staircase, and finally into the cavernous entrance hall, where her mother was standing in an alcove, facing the wall.

"You didn't tell me tha… what are you doing?" Astrid asked, this time cutting herself off.

"Oh, with the acoustics in this old house, that's the only place you can hear me from, up in your room," said her mother. "And don't you look wonderful!"

"I want to ask how it's possible that the most comfortable clothing I've ever worn came out of a forge, _but_ _even more than that_, I want to know why this is the first I've heard that my…" – here she fought with her vocabulary and eventually gave in – "…_fiancé_ is arriving today."

"Haven't I mentioned it to you?" her mother asked.

"You can trust that this is something I would have picked up, mother."

"But I've been talking about nothing else for days – oh, wait, all those conversations were with other people. Well, that does explain it. Now, do try to look presentable, won't you?"

Furiously aware that any slight could be the pretext for a war between their families, Astrid stood perfectly still and ready, radiating all the warm affection of a statue in midwinter. She heard the roll of carriage wheels on the gravel road, their clicking stop, the approach of many marching feet, and at last the great front doors swung open. She didn't even have time to brace herself before the first stuffy noble appeared, and Astrid was sure this was the man she had heard about. Just as the story went, he was at least thirty years older than Astrid, and she guessed his brain would overload if he saw a woman in armor.

"Lord Sagita," said Astrid, determined to at least do more than be displayed at this first meeting. "I hope you'll excuse me if I appear flustered" – _or to be plotting your abduction_, she silently added – "but I wasn't aware I would be meeting my fiancé today."

Sagita smiled with a sort of benevolence that caught Astrid off guard; it didn't fit the situation or his character at all. "Ah, yes, he'll be along shortly. Don't concern yourself too much, Lady Astrid, Fletcher is at least as flustered as you claim to be."

Astrid's face was a slide show on every permutation of 'confused frown' that she could think of as her mind tried to decipher any of what the man had just said. From his dress, there could be no doubt that this _was_ Lord Sagita, but then who was he talking about? Recalling the bit about inter-house war, Astrid clamped down on her first attempt at clarification ("What_ever_ are you blithering about?"), and in any case the man had already moved on to speak with her mother.

Then the stream of Lord Sagita's entourage passing through the doors was broken, and the lone figure who stood there stretched out with an arcane magnetic force that instantly drew everyone's gaze to him. Literally red hair was rare enough, but his eyes were an impossible teal and he radiated the same force that had made Ike such a brilliant leader. The difference was that where Ike had gained respect for his sheer military prowess, this man – barely; he couldn't have been much older than Astrid – achieved it through tremendous, pervasive goodwill.

"Oh, my, are you Lady Astrid?" he asked.

"…Yes," Astrid decided. "…And you…"

"Fletcher, future Lord of House Sagita," he said with a bow – and a _bow_. The archery kind. It was strapped to his back, underneath an empty quiver. "It's a pleasure to m–"

"Why aren't you old?" Astrid demanded. Fletcher's eyebrows tilted in confusion before he noticed Lord Sagita off to one side.

"Old? Why would I – I mean, I realise I'm not exactly elderly, but… _oh_! There must have been some kind of mix-up," said Fletcher. "_You_ thought you were supposed to be marrying _him?_ …Well, for one thing, I suspect Mother would object to that." His grin was a terrible force to be faced with; it was so gently amused that it was impossible he was laughing at your expense, and that only made the embarrassment all the worse. Pure military discipline kept it off Astrid's face.

"Of course," said Astrid, turning her head upward to demand _Why_, of the goddess, _are you obsessed with making my life more complicated than one of Soren's origami crossword puzzles?_

"Instead you get me," said Fletcher, shrugging. "And, ah, it would seem that… I get you. Is there something on the ceiling?"

"No," said Astrid, finishing her deity-aimed rant and returning to the impossible choice at hand – was she to stand by her principles and freedom, refuse the betrothal, and let the foolish nobility of Begnion sort out their own little war… or did she marry a treacherously handsome and friendly lordling?

"I'm a bit of an archery fiend," Fletcher volunteered. "Have you ever wanted to learn?"

Astrid stared.

"I just thought it might be a start," he explained. "I'm not sure how these introductions are usually handled by other nobility. Does your family have a gallery outside the capital, perhaps? ...Uh, milady? The staring is started to get awkward."

* * *

Sothe's daggers were a gleaming blur among his fingers as he nervously spun them. Although it would shock anyone who had ever gotten to know the confident, self-satisfied young thief – and had subsequently been told to A) take a portrait, as it would last longer, B) touch him again and draw back a stump, or C) quit gawking before he killed them in the face – he could get nervous. This situation, facing six-to-one odds against a whole menagerie of competent warriors, was ideal for nervousness.

The mage was obviously the biggest threat, with that Thoron tome in hand, but Sothe was sure he could cut down any mage faster than they could invoke arcane lightning against him. That would be his first move, five steps and a quick double stab, one to the throat and one to the lung. Then the sniper, before he could back off to a safe and effective distance, and then – bloody _hell_, why did they always have to attack before he was done planning?

The five dashing steps quickly turned into a roll as Sothe just barely ducked under the air-rending sweep of the warrior's huge steel axe, so he abandoned the anti-mage rush and instead put his attention onto making that same warrior suffer as much as possible. The thief's roll landed him on his feet again, but bent low enough for a good leap, just barely tucking his toes over the backswing of the same axe and lashing out. His dagger merely clattered off the warrior's plating, and the hulking man merely laughed.

That slowed down a bit when Sothe put the stiletto in his other hand through the armor like a hot wyvern through butter. It wasn't nearly a fatal wound, but it would inconvenience the warrior enough for Sothe to look elsewhere, and dive to the floor again as a large arrow shot just over his head. Hating the sacrifice, Sothe fired back by throwing one of his older daggers at the sniper, who felt smug about dodging it so easily until he noticed his severed bowstring.

By now, the shock had taken effect, and no one seemed eager to charge Sothe, but the fact remained that he was fighting a good 5.29 enemies on his own in a very small, dark room in a part of the Begnion capital where it would just be embarrassing to be found dead. So he was going to squeeze as much out of bravado as he possibly could. The mage stepped to the fore.

"Hey now, look, you're very glittery and all, but I can still fish-gut you in about six seconds flat, so how about we slow down and try talking again? I mean, come on, I bet you can't even _use_ lightning magic indoors," said Sothe, folding his arms.

The mage raised his arm, and sulphur-yellow sparks began to crackle around it. "You'd be wrong."

"Oh," said Sothe, and hit him with a chair. It was a flimsy thing, and most of it broke off, but enough of the back remained in the thief's hands for him to throw through the window. Sothe followed it a moment later, reaching out to grab the first clothesline that came to hand, and discovered that, like most of Begnion, this street was infuriatingly free of laundry strung between windows. He took a moment to sigh before he hit a fruit stand.

"Don't let him get away!" the warrior shouted from the window above.

"Dang it, they know my nickname," Sothe muttered, rubbing the back of his head.

"Apples… so many apples…" the vendor said vaguely, staring at the devastation Sothe had caused on impact.

"Yeah, sorry about that," the thief said, ignoring the Inner Sothe that pointed and laughed as he tossed the fruit-seller jingling coin purse before taking off down the street. _Generosity rubs off,_ he observed._ Gross. I hope I at least got it off one of the hot girls and not Boyd or someone…_

The reason that all the streets were free of clotheslines was that Sothe was in the cultural quarter of the city, surrounded by theatres and opera houses and the Library of Mind-Numbing Historical Records. He considered, for a moment, trying to lose his soon-to-be pursuit in the art gallery just across the street, but when it came to a fight, he knew the collateral damage would require him to travel back in time in order to work long enough to pay it all back. That was out. So was handing someone his cloak and a great deal of money to run in the opposite direction in plain sight. And while Begnion did have sewers… no. Just no.

He was left with the old standby, sprinting as fast as possible along a path that would be impossible to predict, pausing only to leave obstacles in the path of the pursuit. And it wasn't that he wasn't brilliant with that method – _I am_, Sothe reflected, as he neatly turned two horses drawing carts, a bag of apples, and a handful of whiteflower pepper into a chaotic traffic jam – but that they had the advantage. He wouldn't actually be able to _lose_ his enemies inside the city, only in the wilderness beyond, and with their numbers, they would easily be able to follow him.

So once the disoriented horses were thoroughly tangling their gear, Sothe took off in the other direction, turned down a series of alleys, and skidded to a silent, desperate halt just behind the looming figure of the same warrior he had stabbed earlier. He was resting his axe over one shoulder while he lurked in the shadows, watching for Sothe in the busy street.

_The odds against this are incredible_, Sothe stated in general protest to the universe. _A proper, realistic thief would either go for the heart or the back of neck now, and make his getaway during the screaming. Being a thief with much, much more style than that…_ It was lucky that so many carts were clattering on the cobblestones in front of the watching warrior, since it covered the quiet rasping sounds of Sothe's work. It only took a moment, then the young thief took one flick of his stiletto to slice off the warrior's bandolier of throwing daggers and run.

That was hard to miss, and the giant axefighter did turn to strike, but he foolishly chose the obvious move: a massive overhead swing. If it had connected, Sothe would have been literally left beside himself – bisected at an intersection – but with a rope connecting it to his feet in two loose slip-knots, the warrior only succeeded in tripping himself up and tying himself to his weapon. Sothe gave the brute a good half-hour before he figured out how to manoeuvre the axe's blade near his bound feet.

"Gatrie," Sothe muttered to himself, as the warrior's inarticulate roar caught up with him, "you are _so_ going to pay for getting me onto this mission."

* * *

Calill sipped a tall mug of tea so herbal it doubled as expensive conditioner and gave Lucia a measured look. Specifically, it had been measured to indicate, with eyebrows alone, exactly how lunatic she thought anyone had to be to have said what the swordmaster just did. "Repeat that, would you?"

"I think we should try to put a stop to Astrid's wedding," Lucia stated calmly.

"Yes, that's what I thought," Calill said, nodding. "On a related note, I was wondering if I could borrow a big ol' cup of crazy sometime."

"I heard that," said Nephenee, whose dress illuminated distant buildings if she stood in direct sunlight. No matter how she looked at herself in the mirror, she knew the only way she would feel confident was if she added a helmet with a faceplate. "You wouldn' let me drop consonants like that."

"Sometimes, I admit, the situation demands it," Calill said, still thoroughly dignified.

"I'm serious," Lucia stated, begging the question of when, in her entire life, she had ever been anything else. "Ashnard has been defeated, the traitors have been routed from the court of the Apostle, and diplomatic relations have opened again between beorc and laguz nations. This is the start of a new world, and forced betrothals have no place in it."

"Wonderful. Where does your crusade start?" asked the sage.

"Do not mock me," said Lucia. Calill made the mistake of rolling her eyes in plain sight, which was all Lucia needed to be set fully onto her path, unshakeable by act of mortal or goddess. "That does it. Mia, Nephenee, Marcia, get in here!" As the three appeared in varying shades of awkward, something belatedly occurred to Lucia. "Marcia?" she asked of Calill.

"Red with pink hair? The girl was a Valentine's Day card," the sage replied.

"Meuh," Marcia offered, sticking her tongue out at Calill.

"Look, none of that matters. And Calill, you aren't exactly furthering Astrid's cause by acting as if how we look is going to be more important than who we are," Lucia snapped.

"I thought we had already agreed that none of us actually _knows_ Astrid. At all," said Calill.

"Oh, who does?" Lucia scoffed, waving it off.

"Ike," said Calill.

"Gatrie," said Mia.

"Sothe," said Nephenee.

"My brother," Marcia finished.

"Men, all of them," Lucia pointed out.

"Have you _met_ my brother?"

"My point is that they have no idea what it could possibly be like to know, from your childhood, that your marriage would be someone else's choice, and used for political or societal or military gain," Lucia went on. "I'm not afraid of the consequences."

"That is abundantly clear," Calill observed.

"If we can take apart a conquering army led by an evil superhuman emperor bent on genocidal conquest, I think we can meddle enough with some minor noble politics and a couple of royally-approved documents of law to save a friend from a fate–"

"Do not say 'worse than death'," Mia warned. "It can't be _that_ bad."

"He's thirty years older than her," Lucia remarked.

"I'm in," said Nephenee.

"I'm in," Mia seconded.

"I'm late!" Marcia yelped, seeing Calill's clock counting down to the hour. She shot into the side room again, came back out in full knight's armor with ridiculous speed, and flew out the door, catching the frame in her hand just long enough to shout "I'm in!" before vanishing again.

"Ooh, I've got to meet with Tanith in half an hour," said Mia, similarly racing out of the room.

"I ain't missin' my first advanced combat class," Nephenee said apologetically, dodging behind the screen again.

Lucia stared at the vacated space, trying to decide if she felt more betrayed by her friends or the nature of all causality. "That was fun," Calill said, cheerfully. "We should start crusades every day. As long as we don't have to follow _through_ on any of them."

"I could _end_ you," Lucia reminded her friend.

"Oh, calm down," said the sage. "They said they were 'in'. And I suppose I should come along to keep you out of trouble and in perfect style. So we'll all be 'in'. Where shall we begin?"

"I have no earthly idea."

* * *

His cloak torn, bleeding from countless shallow slices, Sothe yanked a red-stained dagger out of the last fallen foe and aimed his furious, eagle-gold gaze at the remaining mercenaries. "Look, I'm really not a big fan of killing. I outran _all_ of your idiot goons right out of the city," he pointed out, gesturing to the forest around them, and the thick, thorny undergrowth that was responsible for most of the blood seeping through his skin. "What do you say you just let me go, for initiative or pluck or who in _Ashera's_ name cares, just let me go and I'll never come back to bother any of you again."

"Yeah, we don't really do that sort of thing," said one of the mercenaries.

"Do you think you can take me down?" Sothe countered. "Out here in the woods with your huge clunky cleaver-swords, never knowing where I'm going to hit you next? I'm betting that with a ten-second distraction I can find a hiding spot until nightfall, and _then_ you're both just doomed."

"We don't need to kill you," said the mercenary, grinning. "We're just keeping an eye on you to make sure you don't wander off and hurt yourself before the boss gets here."

"Oh," said Sothe, taking on a more relaxed pose. "If we're just waiting, then, who wants a quick sparring match? I promise I won't aim for the eyes."

"That won't be necessary," said a new voice, and it was immediately obvious to Sothe that this was their leader – for more reasons than one – returning along with the messenger cavalier who had left the chase a good half-hour ago. "I'd be happy to strike a deal with you."

"I'm overjoyed," said Sothe, blandly.

"Oh, please, no matter what you think of me, you must realise it's a matter of honor that I would _never_ break my word to you. So, what do you say if I promise that neither I nor any of my men will lay a finger on you if you just tell us how much you know?" asked their leader.

"I'd be free to go?" Sothe asked sceptically.

"You'll understand if I don't offer you a ride back to the capital, but yes, you'll be free to run as far as you are able," he said, sheathing his sword with an air of finality. "I guarantee no pursuit. Now, what do you know?"

Sothe gave him the most gloating sneer the world had seen in six hundred and eighty-three years. "Absolutely everything. Right down to the Bow of Falling Stars."

The man raised his brow in mild surprise at that name, but accepted Sothe's claim with a brief nod. He then swiftly drew, nocked, and loosed an arrow that flew, far too swiftly, across the small glade to fell the boy on impact. "Loot the body, but leave it here," he commanded, sighing quietly. "If anyone finds it they'll assume a bandit attack. Then join my father's guards back home and don't have any contact with me for at least a week; I don't want him getting suspicious. And send another messenger if we find that the boy had allies."

"Yes, milord."

The mercenaries' leader turned back and strode confidently out of the woods again, his concerns greatly lightened. At the edge of the trees, he mounted his horse again and galloped back across the hills to meet his riding partner, who was waiting much more patiently than she would have expected of herself.

"Sorry about that, Lady Astrid," said Fletcher. "My father _does_ insist on lessons in decision-making and that sort of thing at the strangest times. And may I say that you're even more gifted with a bow than I would ever have guessed?"

"You may," Astrid said, grinning. She was actually having fun for the first time in weeks. "Shall we ride the target course again? I'm pleased just to meet someone who doesn't think it's odd for a woman to carry a bow."

"Oh, archery is a fine talent for anyone to have," said Fletcher, steering his horse back to the start. "You never know when it might come in handy."


	2. Something Old, Something New

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter Two: Something Old, Something New...**

The most incredibly puffy white clouds were rolling lazily over the palace of Begnion; not the wispy frayed-cotton types, but towering explosions of marshmallowy fluff that caught the sunlight perfectly and hovered in the vast blueness of the sky, each one an avatar of hopeful cheer. Nephenee stretched on the blanket and wondered why anyone in the world would want to be anywhere else.

"So you really called this an advanced combat lesson?" asked Boyd for the third time.

"You bet," Nephenee confirmed, turning her head to see him lying beside her. Boyd had folded his hands behind his head to better bask in the sun, but now he turned as well to meet her gaze. For a moment, there was perfect stillness and peace in all the world, except for a warm breeze rolling across the palace roof.

"Well, that's flattering, but I'm really just pointing out some basic stuff," said Boyd, climbing to his feet and hefting his axe. "You'd figure it all out on your own with intensive practice, but I guess that'd mean specifically rushing after lots and lots of pirates and brigands with huge weapons. Let's start on the backhand defence again."

"How'd you get to learn all this, anyway?" Nephenee asked, bringing her lance up to a guarding position.

"When the boss – Greil, that is – taught me how to use an axe, he made sure to point out all the tricks I could use against lance-wielders. All I've got to do is show you how they work and you're set." Boyd paused and looked thoughtful – a rarity, as Mist would have been quick to point out. "I guess saying that kind of takes all the mystique out of my wisdom, doesn't it?"

"C'mon, Boyd, I got a pretty good idea o' what your kinda wisdom's made of," said Nephenee, grinning. Covering his sudden fluster, Boyd struck with a double-overhead assault that the halberdier easily sidestepped each way. When he seemed left open at the end, Nephenee lunged ahead with her lance, but Boyd had more control than he let on, and slapped it aside with the flat of his blade. With the point out of the way, he rolled along the iron shaft until he was too close for Nephenee to possibly get in an effective hit. Of course, this also put his face roughly four inches away from hers.

"Now what was that?" Boyd demanded, trying to look nonchalant as he jumped as far away from her as he dared on top of a tall building. "I've seen you handle that routine before – heck, I even told you that's what I was going to do. You _know_ the biggest advantage axes have over lances is the weight they can parry with."

"Yeah, that was sloppy," Nephenee admitted.

"No kidding," Boyd agreed. "One backhand swing and I could have had as much of you as I wanted." _…Dear Goddess, I did _not_ just say that, _please. _Please let her have something much bigger on her mind that kept her from noticing._

"You heard Astrid's getting' married this week?" the halberdier asked, distractedly.

Boyd cheered within. _Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes!_ "No," he said, truthfully. "I didn't even know she had got engaged."

"She ain't," Nephenee confirmed. "She got betrothed ages ago. Lucia wants to do somethin' about it."

"Lucia once rushed three wyvern riders during a thunderstorm at night," Boyd reminded her.

"Won, too."

"That _is_ a point. So that's why you called this an 'advanced combat lesson'? Trying to wriggle out of Lucia's crazy conspiracy?" asked Boyd, still grinning over the praise for his teaching skill.

"I don't wriggle," Nephenee insisted, uncomfortably.

"That's a shame," the warrior muttered. _…How do I keep letting this stuff out of my mouth?_ "Well, I wouldn't blame you for it even if you were. Ike and Elincia are about the only nobles I've ever been able to stomach. And Astrid, I guess. But intentionally going up against mansions full of them? No thank you."

"I sorta think I should," Nephenee admitted, almost before he had finished his sentence.

Before Boyd had any further opportunities to put his foot in his mouth, the quiet midday was shattered. Not literally – the fabric of reality itself failed to fracture and collapse into a great pile of indeterminate causality, the dust of random chance and probability rising around it. But there was a literal shattering as something large was flung out of the window of the top floor of the castle, directly underneath Boyd and Nephenee. They rushed to the edge of the roof.

Far below, a tremendous splash broke the surface of the courtyard koi pond. When the spray cleared, they got a glimpse of a giant ornamental vase, its gilded edges gleaming, before it sunk beneath the water. Warrior and halberdier looked at each other.

"Ain't those usually the first to get all smashed up?" Nephenee asked, mostly rhetorical.

"I think we're right above one of the palace reliquaries," Boyd remarked.

"Any chance it's jus' summer cleanin'?" she asked, still on her rhetoric kick.

"Rope…" the warrior muttered, dashing over to the equipment bag he had brought along. Moments later, his curved axe blade was securely hooked around the nearest sturdy drainpipe, anchoring a rope that he managed to throw over the edge a few seconds before Nephenee followed it. "…She's crazy," he observed. _Crazy hot,_ his thoughts amended. "Oh, who asked me?" Boyd snapped at himself, and followed her.

Nephenee was in free-fall for only a single, heart-seizing second before she grabbed hold of the rope and let her fall turn into a neat arc, straight through the window broken by the vase. It was a tough landing, skidding across the marble floor in an uncontrolled tumble, but she did land at the feet of a large mercenary, who gave the soldier a startled, once-over glance before raising his sword to strike. Nephenee's lance was quite a bit quicker.

As she got to her feet – and the mercenary left his – she found that Boyd was right. This level was merely a walkway around the edge of the room, with choice relics of Begnion displayed around the walls. The wide space in the middle looked down onto the main gallery below, where even more palace treasures were held. And on the stairs that connected the two levels, a giant blue knight was being increasingly surrounded by hostile soldiers.

"This is the best you can do? This? Bah! I'll take you down with _him_, and then you're _really_ going to start regretting it!" Gatrie bellowed, sweeping enemies aside easily with his lance. Actually keeping them down was turning out to be a lot harder, and if he had noticed Nephenee, he would have felt much better. Still, pure bravado demanded that he pick up a mage with one hand and fling him headfirst into a group of oncoming mercenaries.

"No one asked you," said one of the attackers, raising his bow. "Hold still and this won't hurt."

"This will," Nephenee stated, and floored him with the pommel of her lance.

"Oh, good," said Gatrie, catching sight of her as he smacked a myrmidon over the railing with his lance. "…How did you get in here? All the doors are locked."

"Duck!" Nephenee shouted across the room.

"You have a duck trained to pick locks?" Gatrie asked, and received a ringing hammer blow to the back of his helmet. However, the knight was harder to bring down than that, and he struck back with a reversed lance thrust before he could even speak clearly again. "Bbllooooddyy wwaarrrriioorrss. _Ouch_."

From his position on the stairs, Gatrie was a hard target to get to, and the crushing force he struck with was hardly an incentive to rush closer, so Nephenee quickly found herself the new centre of attention. Whatever reinforcements these soldiers had called for had now arrived, and there was at least a score of them closing in from all around the room. Being surrounded by no-doubt-priceless artefacts was only going to complicate things more.

The whole experience was like a dance, in Nephenee's mind. At this point, a kind person would remember that, being ridiculously shy, she had little experience with actual dancing, and would just go along with the metaphor. Besides which, there _was_ something symphonic about the many crashes of metal, the rhythm of feet pounding on the marble floor. And Nephenee's one-arm lance-vault over the heads of three enemy soldiers was something most people would happily see every day.

She landed on the far side of the first wave, just as planned, but quickly found herself flanked by the second and third – not quite as planned. Dropping flat to the floor caused a sudden tangle of enemy weapons, giving her a few seconds to scramble out of the way, but when Nephenee rose to her feet and was faced with a row of gleaming axe edges, she had no escape. Fortunately…

"Duck?" she suggested, unable to help herself. The axefighter grinned. Boyd's weapon cut him down in a single cleave.

"Whatwhatwhat?" Boyd demanded, leaping into the midst of the enemy soldiers. "What's all this, then?"

"What?" one of them echoed.

"Good answer," he remarked, and laid the soldier out flat. "Gatrie, what've you got us into now?"

"These mercs are here to steal one of the holy relics of Begnion, probably to assassinate the Apostle and try to conquer the city, and they killed Sothe – I say we bury them in three graves each," Gatrie recited grimly. "You're welcome to join in."

"They _killed_ Sothe?" Nephenee repeated, incredulous. "How did they – how did you – what was he _doing_?" Not waiting for an answer, Nephenee had at the nearest mercenaries with her lance, and Boyd was quick to follow.

"…Exactly what I asked him to," said Gatrie. "I heard the description given to their commander. Hey, where is that accursed–" On the far side of the hall, tall doors swung open to reveal a giant knight armoured in black and white. One clap of armoured gauntlets signalled to the mercenaries to break off their attack, retreating to block off the bottom of the stairs, in front of the new general.

"Allow me to cut you off just there," said the general. "There are rules of decorum in the palace, after all. As for the boy, I think you have to consider our perspective."

"Which is what, exactly?" Boyd demanded.

"That he was irrelevant and in the way. Much like all of you, but you're in luck; we don't need you dead." The helmet turned to regard the mercenary lieutenant. "The inner chambers are open – you know what to do. I'll handle these three."

And with that, to the heroes' astonishment, the entire platoon of mercenaries marched away in double-time, streaming through the open door and spreading out on the far side in a search pattern. The general approached the bottom of the stairs and drew a hammer in each hand. They knew a barricade when they saw it, and although Ike had named this tactic 'playing a round of You Shall Not Pass', he hadn't invented it.

Ever confident, Boyd was the first to rush the general, his axe carving the air in great sweeps. He struck overhand, the enemy matched it, and their weapons clattered together just long enough for Gatrie to shout a warning: "Uh, Boyd, that's the one who threw the huge vase at me…" Then even Boyd found his strength wasn't enough, as the general kept his axe locked high with one hand and lashed out low with the other, sending him flying up the steps.

"Right," Boyd groaned, clambering half-upright before staggering dizzily. "This is _not_ ideal."

"It ain't my turn next, I can tell ya that much," Nephenee stated.

"Well, we'll need a battle plan fast," said Gatrie. "We can't let them have free rein of the reliquary. Whatever Sothe found out about their plans, apparently they thought it was worth…" He trailed off, looking as distant and thoughtful as anyone had ever known him to be. Gatrie wasn't a commander, wasn't used to sending people on missions that got them killed. Bravado would get him through this battle, but Boyd could already see that some part of him had already been utterly broken.

The fighter took control. "You don't mind if we take a couple of minutes to build makeshift catapults, do you?" he asked the enemy leader.

"By all means, continue your prattling," said the general, keeping up a good guarding stance. "You're only making my job easier. I was expecting _warriors._"

"Oh, that does it," said Boyd. In perfect silence, he and Gatrie held a four-second conversation concerning the stairs, the carpet, his axe, and the laws of physics, using only glances and facial muscles. The warrior nodded and sliced along an edge of one stair, freeing the fabric for Gatrie to take hold of. At the top, Nephenee caught onto their tactic and charged down the stairs, leaping at the last moment. With a sudden tug, Gatrie snapped the carpet up and it sprung tight just as the halberdier touched down, catapulting her in a high somersault over the waiting general.

"What in _blazes?_" Boyd followed Nephenee through the air before the general could even fully turn around, let alone strike her down, and then Gatrie lashed out from behind with a thrust that sent the mercenary leader sprawling. The lighter heroes sprinted for the door, but Gatrie stayed behind.

"Now, what I like best about this is how you were left here to keep us busy, but now _I'm_ staying to keep _you_ busy," he remarked. "Poetic, don't you think?" As the other general scrambled up, he reared back for a crushing slam.

"You wouldn't hit a girl, would you?" asked the enemy general, lifting away her helmet. Time slowed down by at least half as she shook out tresses of wheat-gold hair.

"Hmm… yeah, I probably would," Gatrie decided, and attacked.

"Drat," she remarked, parrying the thrust with one hand and ringing another hammer blow on his helmet with the other. "It was worth a shot."

* * *

Drawing herself up to her full, postured height, Lucia gave the attendant a grave look and wished that she had let Calill do the talking. It had taken most of the day just to find House Ceffylau, the city home of Astrid's family, and despite every attempt to look like people who deserved to be let inside, they were facing off against the most stubborn doorman either of them had ever met and not slain.

"I assure you, we are _both_ on the guest list," Lucia stated.

"Be that as it may, madams have also arrived fractionally too early for the reception," said the doorman. His grey eyebrows were bushy enough to double as a blindfold.

"How early?"

"Fifty-one hours," he replied smoothly.

"I am a personal retainer to Queen Elincia of Crimea," said Lucia, "and I cannot believe I am being turned away from the home of a Begnion noble. Where, pray tell, would you expect me to stay, if not with the very family that invited me here?"

"Madam raises an excellent point that is hardly at all undermined by the quarters that the Apostle's palace is required by diplomatic law to provide for retainers to foreign dignitaries," said the doorman.

Lucia turned slightly to confer with Calill, waiting behind her. "Really?"

"Mm-hmm," the sage confirmed.

"Huh. I should read more memos," she remarked, frowning at empty space.

"Unless either one of madams has business with anyone within the building, I must request that–"

"Yes," Calill volunteered, raising a gloved hand. "I most certainly do." The doorman prompted her with a polite lift of his brow that almost made his eyes visible. "I require access to family documentation which I will then scour for any possible way in which the contract could possibly be considered illegal, non-binding, breakable, or in any way unlawful."

"You just used four words for two things," Lucia pointed out quietly.

"Stuff it," the sage advised with ventriloquistic stillness.

"Madam wishes to search for ways in which the betrothal may be annulled?" asked the doorman.

"Yes," said Calill, perfectly truthful and honest.

"And who requested that madam attempt this?"

"Lord Ceffylau," said Calill, uttering the most grandiose and underhanded lie Lucia had ever heard her form. "For reasons of security." Nevertheless, the doorman turned aside to hold the door open for them and bowed, practically averting his eyes as they passed. Lucia wasn't familiar with Begnion's lawbringers or any reputations they had, but it could only help that Calill's colour co-ordination made her look like a highly poisonous amphibian even at the best of times.

"We'd better avoid being seen," Lucia advised, trying not to stare – the house wasn't as luxurious as Crimea's palace prior to the war, but it _was_ only one house on the street. "If we had thought ahead we could have worn all-white dresses and hidden among the marble statues whenever anyone passed. Of course, in this house, standing still and wearing white may be enough to accidentally get engaged."

"Why shouldn't we be seen?" asked Calill. "We're allowed to be here."

"We got inside. That's not the same thing."

"Let me assure you, Lucia, no real Begnion noble can imagine a difference."

"That makes no sense," the swordmaster decided.

"It's complex, all right," Calill remarked. "Now, we've been here for thirty seconds and I'm already bored with their hopelessly stuffy bourgeois decorating scheme. Let's break into the private records archive and change everyone's birthdays."

"Yes to the first part, no to the second," said Lucia. "We need to find out how people have gotten out of betrothals before, and the family archives ought to have all those precedents written down _somewhere_, if we can just find–"

"Bored again," Calill announced, striding away. "Let's stop by the kitchens first."

* * *

With hammers and lance ringing out behind them, Boyd and Nephenee rushed into the inner reliquary. It was full of exactly the sorts of objects anyone would expect; what Begnion nobles would refer to as 'historical artefacts and masterpieces beyond valuation' and what soldiers like them would call 'priceless old junk'. It was so cluttered with tarnished riches, in fact, that they couldn't see even the slightest hint of the scattered mercenaries, though plenty of metal was clattering somewhere nearby.

"Did Gatrie say what they were looking for?" asked Boyd.

"I doubt he was ever knowin'," Nephenee replied.

The warrior regarded another massive vase, exactly like the one flung through the window a few minutes earlier. "At least if they're all this big, it'll be easy to spot what they're trying to haul out. …What's this made of, anyway? The coating is really shiny." Boyd quickly checked his hair in the ridiculously warped reflection shown on the relic's pale gold midsection. Ridiculously spiky and out of control, just as he had styled it in the morning. Good. In the distance of the mirror image, his only warning was a brief flash of light.

Boyd and Nephenee both ducked as the enemy mage's fireball rocketed in, and both braced themselves for the shower of searing-hot shrapnel that would result from the vase's explosive demise, but none came. Instead the gleaming band pulsed with faint light and the fireball bounced away, where it splashed apart on a gong of similar metal.

"Hey, enchanted electrum," Boyd noted, tapping the shining vase with a fingernail. "Silver-gold alloy. Practically indestructible, _and_ it repels magic. Nephenee, check this out when you're done."

She thumped the attacking mage for the fifth time. He was definitely not going to attack them again, nor speak coherently for a few days. "Job to do, y'remember? Sothe dead?"

"Oh, goddess, right," Boyd said, cursing his attention span. "Let's keep an eye out for more ambushes." The two wove among ancient treasures of the holy empire warily. Unable to catch sight of any of the mercenaries in this room, they made for the next door – even sealed inner chambers had sealed inner chambers, in Begnion – and found that it led into a corridor lined with a score of suits of armor, all decorated with the same magical electrum.

They shared a glance that spoke volumes. It took no imagination at all to realise that one of the hollow knights was newly inhabited, and would wait until they passed to leap out and stab them in the back. Unfortunately, the plate mail was thorough enough in covering gaps that they couldn't tell which was the ambusher from afar.

Without much of a break in pace, the soldiers made their way along the corridor, listening for telltale breathing or a creak of old metal in disrepair. Nothing happened. Wondering how any worthwhile mercenary band could miss on obvious trick like this, they were more than halfway through when Nephenee caught one helmet's nervous twitch. Her lance was up in a half-second.

"No trouble, no tricks, and maybe there won't by any stabbin'," she warned.

With that, every suit of armor in the hall stepped off their posts, and an absolute thicket of spears rose around Boyd and Nephenee, their points obviously newer and better-maintained than their borrowed plate mail. "Your terms of surrender are accepted."

"I hate the ones that cheat," Boyd remarked.

* * *

Books were piling in front of Calill at an alarming rate, delivered by Lucia as she vanished into the shelves like a hunting hound into a forest, returned with an armload of dull ancient tomes, spilled them across the table, and took off again. If she were the one on reading duty, as Calill was, the sage expected her friend would not be nearly so eager to grab every likely book. As it was, she might have been piling wood for a winter's worth of bonfires.

"How fast do you imagine I can read?" Calill protested.

"You're the scholarly one," said Lucia. "Besides, you're always talking about books improving your mind. You love to read."

"About ways to channel the primal elemental forces of the world into a fist of retribution with which to smite my enemies, _yes_. But these are pure boredom compressed into page-shaped wedges and then written all over. And not one of them has anything useful to say." She flipped another kite-sized page.

"No references to betrothals at all?" The swordmaster frowned. "But I've specifically been picking out–"

"They're filled with betrothals, but they all went through, Lucia. People don't get out of these things. They're legal contracts applied to nobility with no backbone. What do you expect?"

"I expect people to stand up for themselves once in a while," Lucia fumed. "You there!"

"Me?" Calill asked, startled. Lucia gave a brief, grim nod over the sage's shoulder, to a young man who had just entered the room. From his looks, he was probably a visiting cousin or a new servant on the fast-track to Head Usher and mastery over all employeekind, but either way he was right freaked at being caught in Lucia's fierce gaze.

"How would you feel if you were suddenly told you were supposed to marry a strange woman you'd never met before in your life, just because your parents had got together and decided it was a good idea? An entire, vital part of your life set down in front of you whether you like it or not? Hmm?" Lucia prompted him, arms folded in a way that demanded a response lest his personal honor be stripped away.

"Lucia," said Calill, "he's a man."

The swordmaster fumbled for only a second. "…Also imagine that you're in a completely matriarchal Amazonian society."

"I'd bet he spends a fair chunk of the day imagining that anyway," Calill muttered.

"I suppose I'd be… uncertain of whether I wanted to or not," said the young man.

"Exactly!" Lucia agreed. "You'd want to make that decision for yourself!"

"Yes…" he agreed.

"You'd want your choice and your freedom left alone."

"Yes."

"You would want the power to shape your own destiny!" Lucia declared.

"_Yes_!"

"Fletcher?" called Astrid, leaning into the room with a confused expression.

"Astrid?" Lucia said, startled.

"Lucia? _Calill_?" Astrid blurted.

"Fletcher?" Calill enquired.

"Future Lord Sagita," Astrid corrected her.

"_Lord Sagita?_" the sage and swordmaster repeated as one.

"Well, I think that just about covers it," said Fletcher, taking Astrid's hand. To the sound of Lucia and Calill's jaws slamming to the floor, Astrid shared a smile with Fletcher-Future-Lord-Sagita and tugged his hand closer to her. "These are friends of yours, Astrid?"

"…Yes," the former paladin decided, increasing the awkwardness for both the other women by a factor of several thousand. "We fought alongside each other in the war with Daein, almost a year ago."

"Well, it would seem that arranged marriages are the trend of the week; they're both here researching the whole history of them in Begnion," said Fletcher. He smiled warmly at Calill. "Let me guess, you're the lucky bride. No, wait…" His finger shifted to Lucia. "You are. You seem properly flustered about the whole topic."

"I doubt it," said Astrid with a laugh. "Lucia is one of the retainers to Queen Elincia, and beyond deadly with a good sword – no one could arrange her into anything she didn't want."

"The same could be said of you," Fletcher pointed out, turning a little toward Astrid, who smiled again. She was doing a lot of that.

"You might be right," she admitted.

Around this point, Lucia tried to speak, failed, remembered that she eventually needed to breathe in, and managed to get out "It's a surprise to see you again." _And not trying to slay your arranged fiancé. What in blazes?_

Astrid laughed. "Everything's been a surprise all day," she agreed. "Fletcher just got here this morning, and – well, I can honestly say I haven't had a day this good since I returned home."

"That's… that's great," Lucia said. _Please oh please do not ask why we're looking up information on betrothals…_

"It is," Astrid agreed. "I have to admit that deep down I'm leagues beyond confused now, but we've just been having such a good time I haven't even had time to think about it." She laughed again. "Now, where were you rushing off to, Fletcher?"

"Nowhere important," he assured her. "But if you wanted to stay here and catch up with your friends, I don't mind waiting."

"Oh…" Astrid looked between the three of them. "Lucia, Calill, you can make it back here tomorrow, can't you? I _would_ like a chance to talk before the…" She looked at Fletcher and paused. "Well, assuming there will _be_ a…" Back to Lucia. "Tomorrow, yes?"

"We'd be glad to," said Lucia in the bland monotone of a concussion victim.

"Wonderful," she declared with feeling, and the two of them swept out of the room again, murmuring to each other and laughing continuously.

Lucia and Calill sat in silence for what felt like an hour. The sage's gaze still hadn't left the door, and Lucia knew with increasing certainty that she was going to have to make a tremendous sacrifice – probably a day at a spa and a stylish shopping spree – if she was ever going to earn Calill's forgiveness. Still, she couldn't say _nothing_…

"Well," she began after another silent eternity, "Astrid is certainly doing better than _anyone_ would have expected. And this Fletcher… well." She was overusing 'well'. This was not a state of mind she was used to. _Pull yourself together, Lucia_. "Although the whole practice is outmoded and insulting, I suppose there isn't much point in risking trouble over something they decide they want anyway." She waited and braced herself for icy sarcasm.

Calill looked at Lucia as though she had only just remembered the swordmaster was there. "The man is scum and he has to be stopped."

They stared at each other for another month. "…You really are insane, aren't you?"


	3. War Behind Closed Doors

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter Three: War Behind Closed Doors  
**

Gatrie and the mercenary general circled each other, their footfalls alternately echoing off the walls at triple their ordinary volume or being muffled completely by the plush carpet. Both knights' armor was freshly dented and scored, but neither one seemed to be injured or slowing in the least. Endurance was a quality valued in armoured soldiers; wearing a half-ton overcoat honed it. They had been circling for some time now, refusing to approach, because all Gatrie wanted to do was hold her back. Her hammers were useful against knights, but lacked reach, and with his lance, it was easy for him to keep the coolly enraged woman away.

"I'm surprised at you," she remarked. "None of the stories about you mention your cowardly–"

"Blah _blah_ blah blah blah _blah_," Gatrie summarised. "Skip that and bring it on if you're that tough, but I'm just here to keep you from interfering while my friends kick your soldiers around every vase they can find."

The general smiled in a way that would have raised Gatrie's heart rate, if not for her complete lack of guilt and surplus of amusement over Sothe's death. "So you don't fall for taunting. I'm impressed."

"That's right," Gatrie agreed. "I don't fall for taunting, I don't fall for seduction – try, though, it'll be funny – and I don't even fall for it–" he brought his lance up to engage with the general's hammers as she rushed in, and parried both incoming blows "–when you try to get me so busy boasting that I forget we're fighting to the death."

"I'm not interested," she stated, adding the comma with another deflected hammering, "in killing you." One hammer came in from above, and Gatrie's parry put his lance high to the left; she spun and dealt a swift blow from the right that smashed his plate mail into his ribs. "Prisoners are more useful."

"I meant _your_ death, heartless hammerwench," Gatrie bit out, rebounding quickly from the impact and striking back with a sweeping gouge.

"I just can't fit that into the busy mercenary schedule," the general remarked, locking his lance with her hammers and forcing the swing high. Unfortunately, they both had the same thought – _'Hoof to the gut!'_ – and their feet collided in mid-air, tangling and causing both the unwieldy hulks to fall over. It wasn't even a dignified collapse, but instead painfully slow, and full of the squeaking of metallic friction.

After several more seconds of mighty struggle, they paused and took stock of their immobility.

"I think my gauntlet has caught on your bracer chains," Gatrie stated.

"Really? Well, your lance has wedged my legguards together at the knees," she countered unsympathetically. They wrenched back and forth again, to no effect. The woman sighed.

"This is the most absurd fight I've been in for… seven weeks," said Gatrie.

"…I really do detest you."

* * *

Surrounded by a forest of spears, all pointing pointy-end toward her, Nephenee's mind raced. She and Boyd were plainly dead. By any rights, they ought to get skewered horribly now. Not that there weren't tactics she could think of, but on any list of where a professional soldier wanted their enemies to be, 'surrounded by sharp steel' was _right at the top_. Yet the lances were simply wavering a few uncomfortable inches away, all roughly at the same height. These mercenaries didn't want to kill them.

Why _not_?

Because bodies get noticed. Because dead heroes attract the attention of _living_ heroes in large numbers. And because no one will care much if a band of mercenaries tries to steal something from the reliquary, fails, and no one gets badly hurt. The less notice Begnion takes of them, the better. And because Nephenee had realised that this was how they were already thinking, even though they were still searching the reliquary, she realised that if the group was any good, they were already planning to seem to fail. The best crimes are the ones that no one knows about.

In the same time that it took for Nephenee to think all this, Boyd had got as far as noting that spears were at a disadvantage against axes, but possibly this was outweighed when there were approximately eleventeen times more spears than axes in the equation. To be fair, he also acted first, murmuring "You've got my back," then diving ahead. A broadside slap of his axe drove the nearest spearheads aside for a moment, and with that narrow space available for only a moment, bent double at the waist.

It wasn't a bizarre bow-before-perforation, nor did he mean for Nephenee to protect him while he did so. This was a path. Nephenee propelled herself over and backwards, spinning and sliding across Boyd's back to hit the soldiers feet-first, followed immediately by a tackle that sent them all sprawling. Nephenee herself was hardly massive enough to hit more than one target, but with her lance held out horizontally, she clothes-lined four at once.

The armoured soldiers had little space to manoeuvre in, all to the good for the heroes' tactics. Even as Nephenee was falling, Boyd was rising again to face the lances on the other side, parrying them all aside with brute force. The poles were tangled like a briar for a few seconds – enough time for him to complete his spin, haul Nephenee up with his free arm, and charge away, doing his best to step on as many of the enemy as possible.

"We goin' the right way?" Nephenee asked, from her place slung over Boyd's shoulder.

"Yep," he confirmed.

"How can ya tell?"

"We're moving away from the million pointy things."

"I got _legs_, by the way."

"I know," said Boyd, grinning blankly. "…Oh!" He skidded to a halt and put her down. "So you think some _other_ way is the right way?"

"There's thievin' happenin'. Or already happened. Haven' got that far yet. Either way, we need t' stop 'em from gettin' out o' this place."

"Where do letters _go_ when you don't say them?"

Nephenee grabbed Boyd by the shoulders and gave him a shake. "Where does yer head go when ya aren't axin' things? There's gotta be somethin' in this reliq'ary that's worth stealin', and they already got it or they're lookin' fer it or they're gonna lose one thing and make off with another, I dunno–"

Their conferring was quickly broken up by the sound of clattering boots as the mercenaries caught up again. Neither of them bothered reflecting on the irony of fleeing from the people they were determined to not allow to get away, putting that breath to better use as they sprinted down a side corridor.

"This had better not be a dead… end," Boyd groaned as they attempted to turn a corner and instead nearly ran into a shallow alcove. Knowing her lance was better for fending them off in a narrow space, Nephenee turned to face the oncoming soldiers, but rather than back her up, Boyd started running his hands over the walls. "This is an idiotic place to put a dead end, somewhere there's going to be secret passage, something…"

"Ye're welcome t' find it fast, then," Nephenee said. The mercenaries' armor was old, but still strong stuff, and there was a fair chance of herself and Boyd simply being trampled by the lot of them. Rather than wait, the halberdier leapt forward at the last moment, slamming her lance through the chestplate of the leading knight by sheer nerve. He toppled back into his allies with a deep wound that looked much worse than it was. Mangled, bloody metal rarely inspired the troops.

"Okay, okay, the brackets," Boyd selected first, grabbing the two nearest torch brackets and giving them a twist. With a ringing pop, they both came off in his hands. "Mm. Not so much." For good measure, he flung them over Nephenee's head, into the oncoming throng. Next was the wall, or rather every brick in it, one of which was sure to move.

"Anything?" Nephenee asked, losing ground as she parried three lances at a time.

"Not – a – one – ouch!" Boyd bit out, hammering on the stones and finally kicking the wall. He stumbled back, grabbing for his bruised foot, and fell into the alcove, which obligingly spun and dropped him off on the other side of the wall.

"Not bad," Nephenee remarked, planting her lance point-down into the floor. Holding onto the shaft, she lifted herself into a sharp upward kick to the nearest merc's jaw, vaulted fully backwards, and charged straight through the wall after Boyd. She found him still sprawled and dazed on the far side. "Any idea on keepin' 'em on the other side?"

"Well, I know the bucket trick…" the warrior ventured. Nephenee's glare contained all the answer he needed. "Ah, fine." A couple of heavy swings took a chunk out of the floor, which was hopefully not priceless art, and he slammed that stone into the base of the hidden door, jamming its central hinge. "That'll do for a start."

"Can I help you?" Boyd and Nephenee, as required by law, froze in place and slowly turned toward the source of the strange voice. A man, aging but not quite old, and a girl who might have been his eldest daughter were kneeling at an ancient table, in the middle of one of the most stylised rituals of Begnion's long tradition.

"This… would appear to be a tea room," Boyd observed.

"Indeed, the oldest in the palace," the man agreed.

"Are you here to watch?" asked the girl.

"Well, I don't want to be rude, but, uh, I suppose if you…" Boyd stumbled.

"Where d'ya keep the priceless enchanted artefacts?" Nephenee asked.

"Guess that's the fast way of doing it," the warrior remarked, watching the wall tremble under the first impact of mercenaries.

* * *

Lucia peered around the edge of the door, making sure no one had seen them sneak into the kitchens, then realised that it didn't really matter, as there were a dozen servants working in the kitchen itself, preparing the nobles' luncheon. Once she managed to drag Calill away from the fresh mango and chilled sashimi, they got back to the matter at hand.

"What did you mea – you are _not_ making a sandwich out of that," Lucia stated, instantly derailed.

"It's lunchtime. Now what's the problem?" the sage asked, selecting a fresh loaf.

"Your sudden transformation from bored-tagalong to vociferous hatred of this Fletcher person. I thought he was about the only decent noble I've met since the end of the war," the swordmaster said.

"He's a troll. Or possibly an ogre. Either way, let's lure him down here and then claim it was a baking accident. That'll explain the scorched outline on the walls," Calill suggested, scowling.

"Are you basing any of this fury on anything?" Lucia asked. "Or is this a random thunderbolt in your eternal brainstorm of madness?"

"I like that. That's poetic. And yes, I always have a reason." Calill locked eyes with Lucia. "He's scum." The swordmaster groaned. "What, you can't tell by looking that he's a selfish opportunist whose moral compass always points due abominable?"

"Not from the outside, no," Lucia said. "He and Astrid looked happy."

"Then look more closely." She sliced the unnatural sandwich into triangles with a handy cleaver, then embedded it in the board and spun on Lucia. "She's happy, yes, but people are happy after they escape from barbarians, and it's not because they like scrambling through frigid mountain crags, it's because they're not surrounded by barbarians any more. _Anyone_ would look good to Astrid right now as long as he wasn't old enough to be her uncle."

"To be fair, Fletcher looks _especially_ good," Lucia remarked.

"Please tell me you're not that shallow."

"You have earrings that you wear only while shopping for more earrings."

"Touché."

The swordmaster sighed. "All right. As I have no dignity left to save and nothing to do until the wedding, I'll follow you on this little crusade. Where do you want to go?"

"To someone who'll have the proof we need and not enough sense to keep it under wraps. A Sagita messenger. Definitely male. Perhaps a touch younger than that Rhys fellow, but much older than whatever-his-name-is, the archer. Rolf," Calill decided.

"How long have you been planning this?" Lucia asked, startled by the sage's burst of scheming.

"Since I realised that mango and sashimi are one thing, but on egg bread they transmute into something quite out of the question. I'll bring it to my next book club meeting."

"Your next…" Lucia trailed off, baffled.

"Oh, I don't actually _like_ any of them. Now, just follow me and look bodyguardly."

* * *

Unfazed by the sudden appearance of two professional soldiers and a hammering on the secret door, the tea girl rose to her feet, calmly walked across the room to a stand of fire pokers, and pulled one of them. With a clatter of gears and bars, the alcove-door stopped shuddering with impacts; it had been tightly locked shut. "Much better," the old man said. "Now, we have few mysterious artefacts of any kind at hand, but you are welcome to stay for tea."

"We don't have the _time_–" the warrior began to say.

"Boyd," Nephenee whispered. "There's no other way out of this room."

"That's insane," he whispered back, and turned to face the amiably curious duo. "Okay, you two are just _way_ too innocent, so you're either hideously evil or you have crazy magical powers."

"Or both," the halberdier added helpfully.

"Right," said Boyd, cringing on the inside like Volke being forced to pay for a meal. "So either tell us what you're hiding or get us _out_ of here so we can find whatever those mercenaries are trying to steal. You may think you've got nice locks, but they're plenty resourceful."

The old man smiled. "I think you'll find we're better prepared than–"

With a catastrophic blast, steam and tiny droplets of molten steel burst out from the nearly-invisible cracks around the hidden door. "Hah!" Boyd bellowed triumphantly. "See? We _are_ all going to die!" The stone crumbled and a mage leapt through, flames whirling between his fingers. Nephenee quickly laid him out on the stone with her lance, but the next one thought ahead and sent a bolt of lightning through to introduce himself.

That mage came through with warriors escorting, and Boyd wasn't sure if this would be a better time to die nobly or try to drag the stunned Nephenee up the chimney with himself. Three to one odds with someone down and needing protection was a nasty prospect. Thankfully, by the time he had opened his mouth to demand that the tea-brewers do _something_ to help, the girl had leapt to her feet and began planting daggers in soft bits with laguz-like speed.

"Nice, very nice," Boyd commented. "Hey, old guy! Want to help out? Crazy magic, maybe?"

The man remained kneeling at his table, hands flat and empty, no weapons or tomes in sight. On the plus side – you had to think like an experienced hero to consider this a plus side – he had also closed his eyes and started controlling his rate of breath. Certain that it would be explained soon enough, Boyd hauled Nephenee to her feet and they did their best to hold off the flow of mercenaries.

"Ya think they get this is a tea room?" Nephenee asked, jabbing the lightning mage quite severely.

"I don't mind stupid enemies. With any luck, they'll waste enough time that – _whoa_," – here he dodged a heavy broadsword, let the blade clatter and dull itself on the stone floor, and then hacked the thing in two at the hilt – "that Gatrie will finish up with their leader and warn the Begnion guard."

Out of the dark corridor, a thin shadow seemed to flit through the air, but it was nothing so poetic, merely an arrow that quickly pierced Boyd's shoulder, making him drop his axe in agony. Unwilling to relent, he left the heavy weapon on the floor and began swinging a lighter blade with his left arm.

Nephenee cringed at the bloody sight, but only out of disgust. "Hang back," she suggested, then quickly snatched a dagger off the tea girl's belt and waded into the fray. From somewhere in the shadows of the tunnel, several panicked yelps echoed before the halberdier returned, looking a great deal more satisfied. "That's better."

"This hurts like an absolute freaking son-of-a-" Boyd squeaked, cut off at the last moment by a blinding flash that lasted only an instant. The purple spots in their eyes lasted a lot longer, except for the tea girl, who continued incapacitating unarmored mercenaries with industrial efficiency.

Blinking clear her light-lacerated eyes, Nephenee whirled around, looking for anything to have happened, from the flash-petrifaction of all their foes to the summoning of a thousand mighty and virtuous badgers. Instead, everything was precisely as it was before the flash, and the old man finally looked concerned about the chaos invading his tea room.

"'Kay, how 'bout some o' the 'xplosions now?" Nephenee suggested, brightly.

"You must protect it, whatever happens. You cannot allow them–" the man insisted, sadly unaware that speaking in such as way at such a time was as good as guaranteeing that the next arrow fired from the invading mercenary force would slay him on the spot. It struck with even more precision than the one that had temporarily crippled Boyd, and the mysterious man toppled over immediately.

It turned out very quickly that his ninja tea-girl _was_ capable of turning even more savagely deadly, and she started trying for fatal blows rather than merely disabling ones. Nephenee considered the lance in her hand, considered the sniper who had fired the killing shot, and with a mighty throw, neatly placed one through the other.

The mercs' numbers had thinned greatly at this point, particularly since Boyd and the tea-master's blood began to stain the floor and the usual rules of heroic restraint were declared null and void. Nevertheless, one last berserker charged into the room, having much the same effect on Boyd that a battering ram has on a soufflé, and he was followed by a slinking myrmidon. The tea-ninja danced around the berserker, her daggers causing little harm but holding his attention quite effectively. The myrmidon might have finished off Boyd, except that the green-haired warrior was still holding a very sharp axe and looked like he'd probably bite someone to death before any wound could bring him down.

Nephenee was thinking about tea.

This wasn't nearly as insane as it sounded, because she had just noticed that a string was hanging out from under the lid of the teapot. Among the few things Nephenee had managed to pick up from Calill's lessons was the fact that the Begnion people only grew green tea, and that the leaves were always brewed loose. And before the flash, whatever its purpose, there had been no string there.

She rushed for the teapot, and so did the myrmidon, simply because she had. With a sharp twist and kick, Nephenee managed to stun the merc briefly, and used that moment to pour out the teapot's contents. "Boyd!" she shouted, throwing the pot across the room, and the myrmidon dove quickly after it.

Nephenee smiled grimly. She had poured out the tea through her fingers, and they were now closed on a medallion that looked something like a cross between a lotus blossom and a supernova. It gleamed golden with the promise of hidden powers, just as Mist's necklace had done during their journey. The myrmidon skidded to a halt – leaning against the wall, Boyd had caught the teapot with his bad arm and raised his axe in the other, enough to make anyone think twice – and realised he'd probably been tricked.

"Hand it over or he dies," the myrmidon stated, pointing his sword at Boyd.

Sothe was dead. The old man was dead. This was not the time to threaten Nephenee with Boyd's mortality. She came at the myrmidon with only her buckler in one hand and the necklace in the other. A few seconds later, before she could break the other arm, the mercenary was running at full panicked speed down the once-hidden corridor.

Before Nephenee could even begin to feel triumphant, the berserker's tremendous fist hammered her with the spontaneity of a meteor strike. Exhausted as she was, Nephenee fell like a cut tree, and the berserker snatched the pendant from her hand and followed the myrmidon on his way out, pausing only to give Boyd a pre-emptive kick.

The tea-ninja was barely conscious, supporting herself against a bookshelf, but was still more capable of standing than Nephenee, who gave up after the first time she slipped on blood. None of them said anything at first, nor did they dare move much. Boyd, for one, had already been using his arrow-stuck shoulder too much, and there were no healers at hand.

"…Can't believe they got away," Nephenee muttered blankly. "Let everyone down…"

"Nah," Boyd assured her, breathing heavily. His axe lay on the floor, because he had needed his good hand free at the last moment. He raised it now, letting the shine of the medallion show. "If you ever need an enemy who doesn't pay attention, berserkers are the way to go."

Nephenee smiled weakly. "I could kiss ya," she said. Between the green of his hair and the shade of his face, Boyd appeared to be impersonating a radish. "…But I think I might thro' up." For anyone except Nephenee, it was easy to imagine the sudden tumult of disappointment, disgust, and hope roiling inside the warrior's head.

"On your feet, heroes," said the tea-girl, letting go of the shelves and standing unsteadily free. "The only man who knew what that pendant is lies cold before you. We must take audience with the Apostle's court."

* * *

The confused boy ducked Calill's slap and sprinted away at high speed, for which Lucia could hardly blame him. Since their one-block-away stakeout of House Sagita's closest manor began, the sage had been downright schizophrenic in her attempts to get information out of the messenger staff. It wasn't hard for the stylish, sophisticated 'urbanite' to get a messenger boy's attention, but once she had done so, something in the whole mechanic seemed to break down.

"I don't know if I can explain this to you, Calill," said Lucia, doing her best to 'look bodyguardly'. "These are pages with fairly simple outlooks on life. You appear to be some kind of cross between a human woman and a rare tropical bird. Trying to finesse information out of someone as subtle as a thrown brick does not work. How can I summarize? They would need to be _smarter_ in order for you to trick them into doing something stupid."

"Hmph."

"Do you see my point?"

"Indeed. What I _should_ be doing is asking them outright. Hey! You there!"

"Oh dear…"

The messenger, who had probably seen the altercations his fellow pages had been getting into with the crazy woman, attempted to simultaneously keep up his brisk I-have-a-delivery-to-make pace while still inconspicuously backing off. The movement was far too confused to work. "Uh… you mean me, ma'am?"

"Is anyone else here you? No? Good. On a matter of some considerable imperial security, I need you to answer a few questions," said Calill, hands on her hips, daring defiance.

"I've got to deliver this…" he said nervously, waving a mail-tube. Calill arched an eyebrow. "But I can pause for a moment, I suppose."

"Good. My first question is 'what in the world is wrong with all of you?' No, don't answer that, it's rhetorical. But your friends either need hobbies or a radical reacquainting with the proper laws of courtship. No, don't answer that either. Where are you deliver that to?"

They waited in silence for a moment.

"You're allowed to start answering now," Lucia explained, brightly. "It can't hurt to say, can it? We're not going to ask to read it."

"House Ceffylau…" he replied, hesitantly.

"You've been making a lot of deliveries there?" Calill prompted him.

"All week."

"Anywhere else getting a lot of mail?"

"Not really…"

"What about incoming messages?"

"No one who wanted to send Lord Sagita a letter would send it to this manor."

"Hmph."

"We've been getting sent out for a lot of books, though. From the palace library," he volunteered.

Calill and Lucia shared a slow look. "…Thank you. Run along," said the swordmaster. The messenger sprinted away at top speed.

"That was strangely refreshing," Calill remarked.

"Probably because you weren't trying to out-subtle each other like you've got to with nobles all the time. You make quite the interrogator. …That or you remind him of his mother."

"Take that back."

"Library books," Lucia mused. "The palace library, too, not the Sagitas' collection. That suggests rare tomes, perhaps unique editions. I'd be quite interested in finding out what a lordling suddenly starts getting scholarly about a week before his wedding." They looked up at the imposing mass of the Sagita manor. "A bit of research? We'll need disguises; being spotted by Astrid last time was mortifying."

"Messengers seem to come and go quite a lot," Calill observed.

"And they're all boys," Lucia countered. "I'm afraid for us, tradition generally says cooks or maids."

"Absolutely not."

"Washerwomen it is, then," Lucia remarked, knowing that Calill would rather immolate herself.

"…Astrid had better appreciate this when we're done."

For Lucia, assembling her disguise was irritatingly involved. With Calill's penchant for shopping, they were able to quickly gather the appropriate clothes, but it took considerable effort to hide the swordmaster's battle-ready physique, not to mention her attention-grabbing waterfall of teal hair. She reluctantly settled for a bulky headscarf that Calill eventually apologised for collapsing in laughter at.

It was rather easier for the sage, who swore her companion to absolute secrecy before removing all her makeup. When she was done, Calill bore as much resemblance to her ordinary self as most laguz did to beast forms of a _different_ tribe.

Then it was a matter of joining the occasional flow of servants in and out of House Sagita, which wasn't hard as long as they were doing more than their share of the work. Everyone was only too happy to be best of friends with the new maid who could carry thirty pounds of smoked gammon with each hand. Calill wasn't quite as popular until she reluctantly enchanted a barrel of apples and hauled it in after Lucia, faking exertion under the pillow-light weight.

Within the manor, the chaotic preparations had passed through full-swing, and were approaching triple-swing at great pace. Calill insisted that they were deep in enemy territory now, and couldn't afford suspicion, which meant that more than once they were forced to join in some cleaning or decorating or similar task, rather than plead business elsewhere. Every time they passed a window, Calill noticed that the sun was irritatingly closer to the horizon, and she was beginning to wonder if it would be better to start a fire or just shout that there was one.

Cursing herself for not coming up with a better plan, and wondering how often one person could survive being mortified in a single day, Lucia eventually faked a fainting spell, and Calill volunteered to hustle her out of the way – finally gaining them freedom from the serving staff and they began the search properly. This turned out easier than they expected, because the whole job of _being_ a maid eventually involved going into every room of the manor. Calill immediately dismissed every unlocked door as a dead end, but the question of how to get past the locked ones without attracting attention remained puzzling. At first, they just passed those by, but the one marked with the House Sagita crest was too good to pass up.

"A sufficiently focused bolt of fire–"

"No."

"I don't suppose you've got a stiletto on you?"

"I left my knives at your house."

"I meant the shoe." Calill sighed and began rummaging in her unfamiliar pockets, eventually producing a ring that jingled with a dozen keys. "I suppose we'll just have to hope the maid I pickpocketed had the right one." Lucia rolled her eyes silently; Calill _was_ the type to consider legitimately unlocking the door to be a last resort.

The ninth one clicked, revealing an ordinary fabulously luxuriant master bedroom. The sage and swordmaster slipped inside, closed the door, and began searching as thoroughly as they dared – if anyone realised they had been snooping around, Sagita was sure to double his security, and probably set mercenary forces on them. It was slow, disappointing work, as they steadily uncovered huge amounts of nothing.

"I suppose it'd be too much to hope he had an actual skeleton in his closet?" Lucia asked. Calill opened the far door and glanced within.

"Oh…" she murmured. A predatory grin spread across Calill's face. "No, we've _definitely_ got something."

* * *

"This is nothing," said the Apostle's master jeweller, looking through her valuation glass. "It's probably the least magical thing I've ever seen."

Nephenee, Boyd, and the tea-ninja stared at her blankly. "You're joking."

"I'm not." She held up the frilly golden amulet, letting the light gleam off its myriad curves in a dazzling display. "If it really _was_ 'summoned' as you say, it was either stripped of its power in the process, or it has some other value. Trust me, there isn't so much as a joule of power in this."

"We don' care 'bout jewels; we want t' know why anyone'd be willin' to kill for this thing!" Nephenee snapped.

"It's not listed in any of my books, I can assure you," she stated. "I would recognise something like this immediately. It's quite marvellous, from a goldsmith's perspective. But magic? Not a drop. You said it appeared inside a teapot?"

"Right," said Boyd. "Hanging from the cord, Nephenee said."

"There is no cord on this," the ninja girl observed.

"It snapped off in the berserker's hand when I grabbed it from him, I guess," Boyd said, shrugging.

"There's no loop for it to tie on, though," said the jeweller, holding it up to her eyeglass closely. "It may have _once_ been strung here, but the metal has been cut through, and no ordinary cord could do that. It's alloyed quite formidably. Marvellous craftsmanship."

Boyd and Nephenee shared the latest in a long line of spontaneously-petrified looks. Each was sure their stomach was sinking well through the floor. "The amulet came with the cord," Boyd recalled.

"Th' cord cut right through th' amulet," Nephenee added.

"And there's no magic here," the warrior finished.

"I got a really bad feelin' about this."

* * *

Lucia followed Calill into what she had expected to be a closet. It may once have been, considering the ridiculous hoards of clothes some nobles kept, but now it was a workshop. Bows hung from the walls the way a normal person might hang curtains. A long, scarred workbench was covered with shreds of wood and metal dust, and open books lay in nearly every empty space. Endless variations on arrowheads were piled next to the anvil.

"Plainly he really does like bows," Lucia noted. "We have determined that he is honest in that, at least. And the room is well-lit, as opposed to being a sealed haven for dark and seething madness."

"Seems a bit beyond healthy, though," said Calill, forging ahead. "All of these are bowyer's treatises. Books on selecting wood, different carving methods, reflex physics…"

"I don't suppose he's trying to make Astrid some kind of fantastic weapon as a wedding present? She'd appreciate it, probably, but it's not the sort of thing nobles do," Lucia said.

Calill glanced back at her friend. "You are really quite beyond help when it comes to blind faith." She turned back and bent over the workbench, staring intently.

"Found something interesting?" the swordmaster asked, running her finger down the polished length of a recurve composite.

"The only book here without a layer of iron dust on it – logically, the one that's been getting read most recently. It's not about bow-crafting, either. It's a tome of legends," Calill announced, meaningfully.

"Not what I call incriminating," Lucia insisted. "Look, if a bit of woodworking is the worst secret he has…"

The sage read aloud: "_Though many attempts have been made through the years to recreate this unmatched weapon, all have failed, no matter how precisely the craftsman mimics the original. Many claim that the Bow of Falling Stars is merely another fable, as let no one say its story is any less deserving than the others recorded here_ – good grief, they go on for a while about that. Okay… here. _Those who remember the terrible tyrants of old must trust in Begnion and House Sagita, its makers, to keep the secret of its location if it still exists. Though only a master archer may wield–_"

"Wonderful story, isn't it?" asked a strange voice. It belonged to the mage standing at the door; a formidable figure robed in Sagita colours and emblazoned with the house crest. "But we don't need stories any more." The mage grinned. "You really should remember to lock doors _behind_ you as well."

"This is rather a compromising position to be caught in," Lucia observed coldly. "And you are outnumbered two to one. Do you think we're going to be scared off with something like this in our hands?"

If anything, the mage's grin only widened. "Do _you_ think his Lordship has no such concept as a worst-case scenario?" He snapped his fingers and an Elfire ball ignited in his hand. With a wink at the swordmaster, he cast it carelessly at the far wall, and then most everything available exploded.


	4. Too Many Locks, Not Enough Keys

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter Four: Too Many Locks, Not Enough Keys  
**

Diving to the floor turned out to be a fantastic idea, as the Elfire blast erupted from the far wall of Fletcher's hidden workshop and spewed embers in all directions. Hot splinters fell on Lucia like snow, but were rather less pleasant to brush off. The mage who had cast the spell was looking all too pleased with their helplessness, but he didn't take advantage of the opportunity to incinerate her or Calill. He flung another Elfire arbitrarily, setting racks of bows and stacks of books ablaze, then darted out the door. The lock clicked.

By the time the swordmaster had regained her sense of the floor, let alone climbed to her feet, the fire had swept around the room to engulf every bit of treated wood and dry paper it could. It was insane; no one would set their own fabulous manor blazing just to kill a couple of intruders. It was absolute madness.

As the observant reader will by now have determined, madness was to Calill what Thursday was to most other people. Sometimes it was everywhere, sometimes it wasn't, and in the long run it didn't really have any effect on what mattered, so there was no point getting worked up about it. Because of that, by the time Lucia was thinking 'absolute madness' for the third time, Calill was using a magical gale to fling the anvil through the locked door.

"Anything to salvage?" Lucia asked, returned to reality by the thunderous impact.

Calill hefted the book she had been reading from. "Pyro McImmolation didn't see I was holding this behind my back; everything else is _libre en flambé_. Please let's run before someone sees us in these hideous maid outfits." They did run, leaping through the smouldering splinters of the door and leaving only ash footprints trailing through the bedroom.

Predictably, the blast had attracted some attention, so at the first opportunity the duo slipped into a sideroom – it turned out to be a literal dressing room, lined with at least one tailor's entire life's work – and let the stampede occur outside. Some servants smelled smoke and ran to escape the house, others stormed by with buckets of water in hand, not realising how vast the conflagration already was. By silent agreement, Calill and Lucia shed their suspiciously soot-grimed outer disguises and re-camouflaged themselves in modest finery. The sage wanted to stay and apply her makeup again, but there was a break in the hallway traffic, and Lucia led the charge.

The lower floors were still too full to risk approaching, so they looked instead for a window with strong ivy growing around it outside – ideally, they hoped for a latter, but if distressed, sufficiently bouncy hedges would do.

"This is impressive," Calill murmured, keeping a watch as Lucia attempted to work a window open. "I knew Fletcher was a snake – possibly viper, possibly constrictor, I haven't decided yet – but if we _are_ found, this makes for a fiendish plan. It's all worked perfectly."

"His house is on fire," Lucia grunted, working against the years of rust. Didn't these people ever want fresh air?

"Yes, and it was especially brutal of us to do that," Calill agreed.

"_What?_"

"That's all he has to say. I do have a certain talent with fire, you know. We broke in, set the building ablaze, stole clothes to disguise ourselves, then left again and came up with some foolish story about a mystery workshop and a _Sagita_ mage igniting his own House. But for a family this rich, the repairs will be nothing, and the evidence has been wiped out at the same time that we've been discredited. …We were probably meant to die in the fire, mind you."

"This entire day has been carefully and masterfully sculpted–" with a final push, she forced the pane to slide up "–out of _freaking crazy_."

"I'd bet my best shoe closet that this book is the most important one," Calill went on. "Let's get it well out of here, then figure out how to cause Fletcher some terrible inconveniences."

"You go first, then." Lucia was done arguing with Calill on Fletcher's apparent pure innocence; she didn't think there was anything so terrible about a secret bowyer's workshop, but apparently Fletcher did, and had assigned mages to make sure that no one would visit it twice.

"Fine. Hold this." Calill thrust the book into the swordmaster's hands and clambered through the window, using the sturdy trellis bars like an inconvenient and overgrown ladder. It was just as well no one _could_ recognise her in her current undecorated state, because she was sure she looked ridiculous. There were such things as clothes to secretly flee a hostile fortress in. These were not them.

"On the positive side, I suppose we're relatively safe now," Lucia mused, trying to make sense of the ideograms on the book cover. "Even if Fletcher were here and knew we survived, he wouldn't think we had picked up anything of value, and even if he knew we had the book, he'd want to keep it safe. I mean, I've never heard of this 'Falling Star' bow, but if this lordling is trying to make another, he'll want the reference…"

"Lucia, did you perhaps perform even the most cursory survey of the area before suggesting that we egress by this particular vector?" Calill called up to the window. Lucia mentally groaned. That sort of formality was guaranteed to mean something was hideously, hideously wrong.

"…Why?"

"Because this is the training yard of the Sagita guardhouse." Lucia leaned out and saw Calill surrounded by at least two dozen soldiers, and although Calill was a powerful sage, the forest of blades aimed at her probably deserved odds in any potential battle.

Early as it was, Lucia wasn't one to hold onto a trump card when it could be doing good. She thrust the tome out to show the battalion below. "Hold on, you lot! If you even think about hurting her, this book gets turned into confetti, and trust me when I say Fletcher Sagita will _not_ be happy about–"

A firebolt from above tore the book from Lucia's hands, and it fell in flaming shreds to the courtyard below – a handful of soldiers stepped aside to let it pass, and backed off further when a second flare incinerated the lot of it. Standing on the roof above them all, the same mage looked down with wretched superiority. Lucia immediately began calculating which soldier she would want to land on to give Calill her best shot. A good shot of wind magic could clear a path, if only briefly…

"Let them pass," said the mage. Everyone stared up in surprise. "By order of Lord Sagita. We are fortunate that your misadventures did not wreak further harm on the manor, and as the damage has been determined as accidental, we shall be lenient. Begnion and Crimea must remain friends, after all." He smirked, and Lucia hated him a little more. "However, if you trespass again, House Sagita will bring against you the full force of Begnion law. Now get out."

* * *

Gatrie lay back far enough that the hot water rolled up to cover his ears, filling them with the usual gurgling sounds – something like a frog being rolled down a rubberized metal sheet. It was soothing and desperately necessary, but even as part of his mind melted into a steamed haze, another part rebelled against feeling the slightest pleasure. He had no right to feel good about anything when Sothe was barely a day dead and his killers – by act or by association – were still breathing anywhere in the country. 

It would have been easier if it were anything but his fault. Maybe random brigands on the road, or Sothe's own curiosity taking him too far, but the fact of the matter was that Gatrie had tracked the thief down, asked for his help, used every argument and coercion he had available, and then sent a fifteen-year-old boy to his death. Not intentionally, of course. Like that mattered.

As he cursed himself further for this, the door opened, a water-muted female voice screamed, and it banged shut again, bouncing slightly open from the force of impact. Enough for him to hear the conversation taking place outside.

"There's a water buffalo in my bathtub!" Calill shrieked.

"That's Gatrie," said Nephenee's voice.

"It's actually pretty easy to tell the difference. Gatrie has fewer horns and would make a lousy coat," Boyd chimed in.

"What's he _doing_ in there?" she demanded.

"Aching!" the general called back, and winced at the protests of his muscles.

"We've had a bad day," Boyd said, by way of explanation. "Mind you, the Apostle was nice enough to use a Mend staff on the hole in my shoulder, so things are looking up for me. Where've you been, cornering the Begnion shoe-futures market?"

"…Maybe you should start from the beginning," Lucia suggested. Gatrie sunk back until only his face was open to the air; he didn't need to hear any of the battles repeated. It had been bad enough dealing with that general the first time, especially after their armor got locked together.

They had struggled with the jammed metal for a long time, all without result, before a berserker charged by outside the room, shouting something about success. She had disengaged some catch, opened her platemail at the back, and emerged from her armor like a butterfly from its cocoon. Luckily, she hadn't drawn a weapon and taken the opportunity to kill him, because Gatrie wasn't at all sure he could have unlocked himself from an empty suit of armor fast enough to fight back, either.

_Instead she just tossed off another quip about why I had sent a kid to do my job, then took a leap out the window and into the fish pond._ The rebelling part of Gatrie's head flared again with renewed fury. _I swear to the goddess that when I get the chance – and I will – I am going to kill that wench._

"…And then there was this tea-girl like a ninja, it was crazy…"

_And in a building with two gorgeous ladies – not counting the one who's plainly got a thing for Boyd – I had to meet with the evil one instead of the one who takes three hours to serve tea stylishly._ Although he wasn't doing anything except soaking and, as previously mentioned, aching, Gatrie still managed to stop cold. _Oh goddess… the kid was sixteen and probably spent his whole life on the streets of Crimea. I bet he never even got to kiss a girl. What the hell is wrong with me? I should have just let him go when he said it wasn't any of his business. I am such an idiot._

"That's pretty brutal," Lucia agreed, grimly, as Nephenee finished describing the battle in the tea-room. "And here I thought we had been doing badly. All I got were a few seared fingers and an introduction to Astrid's fiancé." There was a pause, Gatrie guessed she was looking up at Calill's grandfather clock. "Of course, in another thirty-six hours or so, they'll be married, unless we can prove he's up to something sinister."

"You believe me now?" Calill asked.

"Yes. It's pretty foolish of him; if it weren't for the mage trying to roast us both where we stood, I'd probably have shrugged the whole thing off as eccentricity. Instead, even as he covered his tracks, Fletcher's convinced me that he had tracks to cover. And I'm not willing to assume that the mercenaries you fought were working for anyone but House Sagita," the swordmaster stated.

"Definitely. Gatrie filled us in on some of the things he and Sothe have been tracking over the last few weeks–" Boyd began.

"Sothe's here too?" Calill asked. She sounded pleased for the first time in hours. "Excellent. That boy's like clay ready to be shaped. He's got the attitude, but what he really needs to attain style is the right look, maybe with a little less green… what?"

"Eh… we didn' tell ya 'bout Sothe yet, did we?" Nephenee realised.

"What about him?"

Gatrie began rhythmically knocking his head against the side of the tub, letting the ringing metal and the turmoil of the water block out even the most muffled speech. When he stopped, and tentatively raised his head above the steaming surface, the general didn't hear anything coming from the other room, even whispers. Maybe Nephenee had mentioned his state of mind. He really didn't care.

"I don't understand," said Calill at last. "How can he be that distraught when the only evidence you've got is the word of a couple of mercenaries that So–" Gatrie scowled as someone cut the mage off; all right, maybe he did still care a little.

"Why bother lying if they didn't know Gatrie was listening?" Boyd asked. "Heck, why bother lying if they _did_ know he was listening? If Sothe could prove them wrong, he'd have done so right now. According to Gatrie, it didn't even sound like they knew who Sothe was at the time. Just… _fwip_."

The general could imagine Boyd miming an archer loosing an arrow, and winced as he imagined the fatal blow again. Arrows were not a clean way to die, if such a thing ever existed. The shock of impact, and the strange pinching feeling that didn't give way so much as it was overtaken by a wave of pain. And the hideous warmth of spilt blood, so silky and soft, and then… he didn't know. Every time in his life Gatrie had thought he was going to die, he had been wrong, so he had no idea if it was anything like what he imagined.

As he pictured those few seconds for the hundredth time, some part of his mind that was paying more attention caught a phrase on the air and stamped it hard across the inside of his head. There was something like an eruption, and then he was dripping hot water all over Calill's floor.

"What did you say?" the general demanded.

"I'm not saying anything until you correct your state of dress," said the sage, who had clapped her hands over Nephenee and Boyd's eyes.

Gatrie looked down at his white kilt-and-toga combo. "What? I grabbed enough towels."

"There may not be such a thing," Calill remarked.

"And why did you cover _my_ eyes?" Boyd asked.

"The alternative was too cruel to imagine," the sage replied, but let the younger soldiers go. "All right. Which part are you referring to? I was just telling them about the mage ambush at House Sagita–"

"Workshop. You said there was a workshop. And a lot of bows. Sothe was… I mean… Sagita killed him!"

"That's quite a leap, Gatrie," Lucia said, cautiously. The general looked like he could break a fortified bulwark with his forehead and not notice until the next day. "There's no proof of any such thing."

"We haven't had proof for _anything_ yet," Calill mused. "I knew Fletcher was evil on instinct. You knew immediately that we had to do something to stop Astrid from being forced into marriage. Gatrie, I haven't heard the story in detail, but I get the impression you started your personal crusade on a certain hunch, too."

"…Something like that," he muttered, apparently still not sick of reminding himself that his wild speculation had led to et cetera et cetera dead thief.

"Which means that war-honed instinct is all any of you have had to call on, and we've already managed to get a very clear indication of our opposition and the problem we have to solve," she concluded.

"Wait, what do you mean 'any of you'?" Lucia inquired.

"I, of course, have refined urban awareness and cuttingly incisive perceptions."

"You're using words that mean the same thing again."

"They're called synonyms, dear."

Gatrie managed to draw their attention back with a hammer-fist to the wall. "Excuse me, but if you wanted to start being relevant again any time soon, that would just be _magical_."

Calill was taken aback, but returned to her point quickly. This wasn't a side of Gatrie they were familiar with, and she didn't especially care for it. "Well. We know Fletcher Sagita is planning something. We know he has a strange obsession with bows, including the purely mythical. We know he sent mercenaries to steal something from the Begnion reliquary. And we know that Astrid is somehow important to his scheme, otherwise I doubt he'd take the risk of marrying her at a time like this."

"Excepting one possibility," said Lucia.

The sage glared at her friend, interjecting in the middle of a perfectly erudite monologue. "What's that?"

"He could hones'ly be in love with 'er," Nephenee said, somewhat dully. She was plainly feeling more reserved than in the morning, what with innocent people dying all around her and Boyd nearly getting an internal draught installed. For a moment, everyone looked as pensive as she did, considering this option.

"To hell with that," Boyd decided eventually. "If he does, it still won't matter, once we convince Astrid that he's a scheming murderer. And if he doesn't, that's one more reason to take him out fast."

"It would be so much simpler if he would just send assassins after us," Lucia said. "At least, if they were considerate enough to bring Sagita identification, maybe signed orders from Fletcher."

"Not tonight, thank you," said Calill. "We lost too much today. It's past midnight. Tomorrow is our last chance before the wedding, and we will bring Sagita so far down he'll change time zones, but not _until_ tomorrow."

"You expect me to sleep?" Gatrie growled.

"Yes. You need to recover more than any of us. And if I must, I'll use a staff."

"You never learned how to cast spells with sleep staves."

"Spells? Who needs that kind of finesse? I was thinking more 'mild concussion'."

"…I have every reason to detest you."

* * *

Nevertheless, by the time dawn had broken, Gatrie was forced to admit the sage was right. Healing magic was an excellent start, but sleep had erased the last of his fatigue and sharpened his thoughts considerably. Sothe was still dead. Fletcher Sagita was not. Within two dozen hours, he intended to even the score, with or without the help of Begnion or his friends. 

"It was a bowstring," Boyd stated over bacon. "The thing they stole from the reliquary. Someone tied a shiny medallion on it as a disguise, but it was really some kind of enchanted bowstring. I mean, it cut through metal, and it was the only thing those mercs were after."

"I agree that makes sense, given his workshop, but every bow in there was torched," Lucia pointed out. "And you would have noticed if they had stolen something else, however well disguised it might have been."

"I know, and that's confusing, but if we could find any other copies of those books you saw–"

"What happened to Sothe?" Nephenee asked, abruptly. Everyone looked at her, then Gatrie, then back to her, this time wondering if it was possible that her farmland upbringing had involved more severe head trauma than they had previously imagined.

"What part of 'dead' isn't clear?" Gatrie asked, flatly.

"Th' 'why' part," said Nephenee. "Fletcher's let all o' us go free, more 'r less. Only people who've bin killed were Sothe an' the man in the reliquary. I'm wonderin' why."

Gatrie was quiet for some time before answering. "I heard about Astrid's betrothal getting finalised a few weeks ago, from Oscar through Tanith via who knows where. I remembered what she said about hating the idea, back when we were in the army. Figured a good place to start was seeing if Sagita was in the secret laguz trade. Found Soren in Gallia. He knew where Sothe was, goddess knows how, and said I could do worse than trying subtlety for the first time in my life.

"Sothe knew Astrid pretty well, too, so he only took a few days to convince. We weren't getting anywhere from the outside and time was running out, so he got into their messenger service and went the espionage route. Couple of days later I'm following one of Sagita's undercover messengers through the palace, waiting to hear what orders he's delivering to those mercs, and it was nothing but 'Go ahead with the theft', whatever that was. The guy also reported that they had – he reported what happened, and I guess I sort of went berserk."

"…I'm sorry," said the halberdier.

"None of it was your fault," Gatrie said stonily. "What's now?"

"That still doesn't explain why they would–"

"I am so bored with this," said the general, abruptly rising from the table. "The rest of you can keep playing detective. I have an uppity lordling to thrash." He slipped the remainder of his armor on, not yet concerned with all the straps, and marched out of the apartment. The others watched him go, not protesting. Often Gatrie was a people person, especially if the people in question were gorgeous women. This side of him, the angry loner, was an equally ridiculous stereotype, and still he wore it with perfect sincerity. They knew better than to follow.

"When he's done breaking things," said Lucia, "we had better know where to stand to pick up all the pieces that will prove Sagita's up to something sinister. Even if we can't touch him ourselves, I'm betting the Apostle will tear him up with a smile."

* * *

Fletcher was pacing, and to anyone who knew him, it would have looked like a sign that he was edging towards utter breakdown. This was one of the trickiest parts, and required too much improvisation, too fast. The sage had been an unexpected complication, especially since the sage had been ridiculously lucky in picking up his prized tome on her way out of the manor. Kicking the dew out of the long grass with each step, he watched the girl's approach and muttered to himself. 

"Assassination? Impossible. Dishonorable. Sabotage? Nothing to sabotage, not that I want anyone knowing about. Drat. Laguz trade? I'd rather not accuse father of anything that hideous…" The lord's gaze settled on the horizon, the distant mountains still blurred by dawn fog. Mountains in the northeast. Far enough beyond, a whole nation of mountains, one that had been conveniently treacherous.

"Good morning, Master Fletcher," said Astrid, arriving with her horse in tow. "I was pleased to receive your invitation back to the archery grounds."

"Good morning, Lady Astrid!" Fletcher exclaimed, pivoting to her with a wide smile. "If you're happy, I'm happy – and I thought we could _both_ use the relaxation, given how much else is going to happen over the coming days." His words gave Astrid pause; he had reminded her of the wedding tomorrow, one that she still hadn't precisely agreed to. Astrid was the only one who thought her opinion mattered, of course, but her stubbornness was formidable.

"…Indeed," she said at last, still hedging. It didn't matter; he simply needed the few further moments to think, and then an opening. Fletcher coughed politely.

"Astrid, I'm afraid I have some troubling news about your friends," he said. She frowned, confused. "From yesterday morning – Calill and Lucille?"

"Lucia."

"Yes. Her especially. She's one of Queen Elincia's personal retainers, and I'm afraid the new Queen is still rather wary of House Sagita. My father had strong ties – hidden, subtle, but strong – to Daein until shortly before the war began, and it seems even now Crimea is determined to prove he's guilty of some such thing or another – they invaded House Sagita, and, well, it may have been unintentional, but it's hard to believe, considering the damage wrought…"

* * *

The fresh new day was utterly lacking in novelty, and to Gatrie's sensibilities felt all too much like the day before. Yesterday they had all – independently, even – made the same mistake, and gone looking for evidence to what Fletcher was up to. Pointless. Useless. What they needed was proof that he was up to _something_, and then they'd be allowed to make him as dead as he desperately needed to be. Even in his anger, Gatrie knew better than to kill a noble without proof for the Apostle. 

If necessary, he would tear the whole of House Sagita apart to find it, and part of him felt like doing just that, if only to spite the cheerful sunshine and tranquil breeze blowing through the streets. But Sagita was sure to have covered himself on every angle he could, now that his workshop was a barbeque pit and he knew Gatrie and the others were after him. He couldn't rely on carelessly discarded incriminating anything–

Ah.

People were harder to keep tucked away. The mercenaries at the palace hadn't been wearing Sagita colours, of course, but they had also been professionally adept at their job, and didn't seem to think much of the messenger who reported Sothe's death. That suggested independents, hired just for this occasion, including that regrettably attractive general with hammers and the charm of a viper with the flu.

Well, Begnion's capital was an upstanding city, but somewhere there had to be a mercenary guildhall or something – a place to look up those who were willing to do most anything if it coincidentally ended with sacks of cash in their hands. _Oh, how heroic of me. I'm going to try to sneak up on a murdering wretch when I already know where he lives._ …If necessary, he would then tear the guildhall apart with his bare hands until they told him what he wanted to know. This thought cheered him up a bit.

* * *

"And that leaves us alone," Boyd remarked, still watching the door where Calill and Lucia had left moments earlier. "Astrid will believe them, right?" 

"Why wouldn' she?" Nephenee asked. "Friends, ain't we? Comrades-in-thing."

"Arms," said Boyd, absently. "I don't know. We haven't even met Fletcher, but everything I've heard tells me he's going to be ready for them, wherever they catch up with Astrid." He shook his head, knowing that tagging along with the women would, at best, only slow them down a _little_. "So what do we do with bruises to nurse and a fashionable apartment to ourselves?"

"I'd be likin' t' know why ya keep askin' that question," said Nephenee, grinning at him. Boyd flushed red, and was low enough on blood that this made him slightly dizzy. "It's enough t' make me think ye've already got somethin' in mind."

"Ah, stop it," Boyd muttered, averting his gaze. That only lasted a moment, and then he locked eyes with the halberdier again. The number of things in the room not being said skyrocketed, but they held it long enough for most of them to not need saying any more. Boyd matched her grin, and was perhaps on the verge of actually saying something when Nephenee's eyes snapped wide open.

"Soren!" she blurted.

"…What _about_ him?" Boyd asked, suddenly frowning hard.

"Ah, _you_ stop it," said Nephenee, waving off his reaction. "Listen, Lord Ike 'n Lady Elincia'll be here fer Astrid's wedding, right? Soren's sure t' go wh'rever Ike does, an' if anyone's gonna know what that string was for, it'll be 'im. Am I right 'r what?"

Boyd thought for a moment. _The things that I didn't say sounded like a lot more fun…_ "It's better than sitting around being useless until Calill or Gatrie needs us to bash someone again. Let's go."

* * *

It took Gatrie most of the morning to find the mercenaries' guild, but he did. The old stone looked like it would be tough to take apart with just his hands, but with a good mining axe, that was still a backup plan. He marched directly to the door, took a defiant pose, pulled one fist back to hammer the portal open – and clanked back down the street as fast as he good in that much plate armor. 

"Subtle, Gatrie," he told himself. "You're going to be subtle until you can kill Fletcher in the face. That means not tipping off your enemies at the first opportunity." Reluctantly, he unfastened the straps on the majority of his armor – all but the greaves and bracers – and stowed it in an empty woodbox in a side alley.

He considered the lance, but eventually settled on keeping it at hand, like a good mercenary should. Gathering a handful of coal dust from the box beside it, he darkened his hair almost to blackness, then calmly marched back down the street. That gave him something more like the typical arrogant soldier look, perfect for questioning the guild-people about recent jobs, or perhaps directions to a band specialising in high-profile intrusion commissions. One way or another, he'd find them.

Still no one was entering or leaving the guildhall as he approached. Either it was closed, or this was the slow season for sellswords in Begnion. Uninterested in either option, he barged in and swept the main hall with the critical eye of a seasoned adventurer taking stock of his surroundings.

He couldn't help but notice that he was surrounded by unfriendly faces, including the female general not two feet in front of him. She hadn't replaced her armor, yet, but he was similarly underdressed for the occasion.

"I was a little predictable, eh?" he asked.

"I could practically taste your obliviousness from a block away," she agreed, nodding.

"Okey-dokey," said Gatrie, blandly. He flexed muscles in preparation to break her nose with his forehead, felt a sudden thump at the back of his head, and his world crumpled into peaceful unconsciousness.

* * *

Astrid charged down the course, having pulled far ahead of Fletcher – he was good, but she was a veteran paladin, and the only way to make the course a challenge was screaming down at maximum speed. She feathered a trio of targets in rapid succession, letting the tattoo of drumbeats bring her back to a comfortable, almost meditative state, almost like she had never left the army. She could imagine Titania running on her right flank, Kieran covering her left, the three of them racing to reinforce footsoldiers ahead – like Lucia and Calill, who mysteriously burst out of her imagination and onto the course. 

She skidded to a halt between the women and whirled about for a moment before remembering that there were no Daein soldiers or pirates to battle. "What are – how did you find me?" she blurted.

The sage and swordmaster shared a steely glance. "We need to talk," said Lucia.

"Don't be rude," Calill told Lucia, offhandedly. "It took a lot of effort on our part, Astrid, but eventually we managed to ferret out this place's location from one of the Ceffylau attendants. We've been walking all morning, so please don't rush off again before we can explain."

"You can't marry Fletcher," said Lucia.

"Will you stop leaping ahead?" Calill demanded, noting Astrid's sudden bewilderment. "Excuse her, she's being much too forward."

"Much too _sane_," Lucia muttered.

"What are either of you _talking_ about?" Astrid demanded. Her horse _snurfed_ at her outburst, and she stroked its mane to calm it again. It was a good horse. It was likely the only friend she'd ever had who never made life a hundred times more complicated in the space of a blink.

"Fletcher Sagita is an evil mockery of a real human and you can't marry him tomorrow, no matter how much easier it would make your life. He has something despicable planned, he hired mercenaries to sack the palace, and Gatrie thinks he killed Sothe," Calill listed with flat intensity.

"Gatrie? _Sothe?_ What in the world… _dead?_" Astrid repeated. Calill didn't know what to make of her expression; instead of distress, sadness, or even confusion, she seemed to be disappointed. Maybe even angry. Well, anger was good, as long as it was directed at– "I can hardly believe this, Calill. I thought you were better than that. And you, Lucia. Or was it your idea?"

"Eh… what?"

"Fletcher told me about Elincia's orders. Now, if you were just concerned for my sake, that would be one thing. Until yesterday, I thought this was going to be the worst chapter of my life. But to try to sabotage this whole affair just because your Queen is suspicious of House Sagita's dealings with Daein is _not_ my idea of friendship!" Astrid snapped.

"Do you feel at all like you're being savaged by a bunny?" Lucia whispered to Calill.

"It's about that level of surreal, yes," the sage agreed, then spoke up. "Astrid, neither of us has any idea what you're talking about – do you really think we'd lie about Sothe being dead?"

"And to say that Fletcher murdered him? What kind of gibberish is that? I'll tell you: it's gibberish meant to shock me so long that I call off the wedding, offend his parents, and the whole thing falls through!"

"Astrid, you're raving a little–" Lucia began, in what she probably imagined was a conciliatory tone.

"Raving! How dare you! If we hadn't both fought under Lord Ike, I wouldn't even know your name, and you would rob me of a chance a peace and perhaps even happiness because of political grudges!" she growled. "I've heard already heard about the fire, so don't bother lying about that, either. Accidental or not, I'm shocked by the very notion of it."

With a click like the lock of an impassable prison door, Calill realised what had happened to Astrid, that the firm, brave young woman would be replaced by this lunatic. She was tired of living in fear for her future, tired of being an ordeal for her entire family. It wasn't hard to see that Fletcher – if he had been what he said and nothing more sinister – would be a good match for her, and Astrid was too intent on holding onto that to listen to warnings that would make her defy Lord Ceffylau again.

It didn't hurt that her fiancé had pre-emptively packed her with a neat web of lies, either. Lucia didn't even know if Sagita had ever been connected to Daein, but it made for an interesting story if you were prepared to accept that Lucia herself had no personal honor or sense of duty to her former comrades-in-arms. And Astrid was right on one thing: they didn't know each other all that well. Maybe it wasn't such a stretch.

"Lady Astrid, if it were anything but the most serious of concerns–" the swordmaster began.

"–We would be content to leave you to your own hideous choices and let you suffer the consequences," Calill finished for her, suddenly wearing an expression as friendly as a rusted mace. "But apparently you've lost the courage that raised you above the rest of the Begnion nobility, and until you put in the effort to recover it, feel free to keep deluding yourself."

Lucia boggled at her companion, which would have been quite a spectacle under normal circumstances. In this case, no one noticed.

"How dare you," Astrid repeated coldly. She heard distant hoofbeats, and saw Fletcher round a corner in the distance, finally catching up again. "It's time you left the Sagita estate, I believe."

"Trust me, Astrid, by the time this is over you'll wish you had listened to us," Calill insisted.

"Are you threatening me?" she growled.

"No," said Calill, the indignation seeping out of her. "I'm trying to help you. Lucia, let's go. It's a long walk back into the city." High above them, the ocean wind began drawing clouds in off the coast. By the time they returned, the sky would be iron-grey, without a hint of sun shining through.

* * *

Gatrie awoke with all his limbs attached, no new bruises except the one at the back of his skull, and all his blood right where it was meant to be. Compared to the last few days, he was already off to a fantastic start. On the negative side, of course, he was shackled at the wrists and ankles, tied to a sturdy thing that might have been a chair and might have been a polearm rack, and in a very dark room with no weapons at hand. So. Chances weren't great that he had been rescued by a ninja tea-girl society while he was unconscious. At least not one of the good ones. 

"I still can't believe we're not killing him," said a voice from nowhere – Gatrie quickly decided that whatever big closet they had locked him in didn't have thick doors. There were mercenaries standing guard outside.

"Yeah, well, that's the order. No killing any of them," said a similar voice. Gatrie grinned in the darkness. It was a very good day when your enemies needed you alive. "At least not unless he's causing serious trouble and we've got a good place to stow the body." Well, damn it. The chances were approximately ten thousand to _zero_ that their general didn't have a good place for his body already picked out. So much for the simple plan.

Carefully and wincing, Gatrie touched the back of his head against whatever wall or furniture was behind him. The swelling was already going down – he had to have been out for a couple of hours. _Hours?_ Oh. Of course hours. If Sagita was trying to play this the subtle way, all he needed was for Gatrie to be conveniently locked up until the wedding was over. That confirmed that the wedding was important, but it gave Gatrie all the less time to work with, too. He had to work quickly.

So much for the complex plan.

* * *

Though it was only the afternoon, the city was dark as dusk and rain was lashing the windows when they returned to Calill's home. The lamps were out; Nephenee had scrawled a surprisingly legible note and left it on the table: _Out fetching genius, back later. N&B._ Well, legible if not comprehensible. 

"I am racking my brain," said Lucia, "for any idea of where we turn to next, and all I can think is that we just got routed by the person we're trying to save. Astrid doesn't believe us. Sagita's covered all his tracks all too well. Even if we could convince her, the Apostle couldn't act without proof of whatever he's doing; Lady Elincia told me all about the catastrophe with Reyson and Oliver."

Calill slumped in a chair, rereading Nephenee's note and demanding that it explain itself. Lucia didn't think she had ever looked so tired in the entire Daein war. She reached over and placed a friendly hand on the sage's shoulder. Calill glared until she removed it. "I know," she agreed, rubbing her eyes. "This is ridiculous. How is it possible that we go this far and still get kicked in the teeth? It's been almost two days of constant conflict and we have _nothing_. Nothing!" She scowled and thumped her head on the table again.

An echoing thump placed several torn, smudged pages on the polished wood in front of her. Calill and Lucia's eyes travelled up, from the papers to the gloved hand holding them down, all the way up to a face that was darkly and oddly cheerful for all the battering it had plainly taken, not to mention the grime and torn clothes.

"And now," Sothe informed them, "my victory dance." He spun away from the table and burst into triumphant motion.

After a few silent moments, Lucia said, "Well, it's happened."

"…What has?" asked Calill, blinking blankly as she watched Sothe moonwalk across her parlor.

"I have reached the absolute maximum threshold. I can no longer be even slightly surprised."

"Oh, yes. You get used to that."

They continued to watch Sothe dance.

"You know, he's actually pretty good."


	5. Thief Rules

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter Five: Thief Rules**

Eventually Lucia reached out and grabbed Sothe by the shoulder, putting his victory dance to an abrupt stop. He glared at her without much vindictiveness. There didn't seem to be any way to make the question less forward, and in any case the thief had never cared for polite language anyway. "Uh… Sothe, why are you alive?"

"Oh, Death and I go way back," said Sothe, his humour as ever dry like the midsummer desert. "I have to feed his cats the next time he's out of town, though. …Neither one of you is going to try to hug me out of desperate gratitude, right?"

The women looked at each other. "Not likely, no," said Calill. "Unless you wanted–"

"No, no, I'm good. Besides, I don't feel like putting my ribs through any more crushing today." He nearly fingered a hole in his green vest, but pulled back before he could make contact – the motion of someone instinctively reaching out but remembering from experience that this is a bad idea. The tear looked exactly like past arrow-wounds Lucia had seen on the battlefield, but lacked bloodstains.

"Um… that's where…?" the swordmaster asked.

Sothe nodded. "Everyone always thinks you need really heavy plate mail to survive arrows. Thieves know better – actually, Volke taught me this one, so I really shouldn't tell you about it. Trade secret, so to speak."

"You caught it in your teeth and then faked the wound?" Calill suggested.

Sothe stared at her blankly. "…Yes. That is _precisely_ what I did." The sage nodded, one tradesperson to another, as Sothe rolled his eyes so hard he was in danger of spraining them.

"What's this?" asked Lucia, picking up the pages that the thief had delivered. "Also, have you told Gatrie you're alive? He's been a mess for a couple of days now."

"Didn't see the lunk; guess I'll tell him when I tell him," Sothe replied. "As for those, well, it's all the stuff I was able to smuggle out of House Sagita that looked worthwhile. And having read it, I know it's worthwhile, but I was too busy staying alive to scheme anything up. I'll leave them in the capable hands of you two ladies and get out of your way." He turned and made for the door.

"What? You're a wreck, you're in no condition to–" Lucia began.

"Hey, you had your chance to be maternal when I warned you against the hug," said Sothe, finally cracking a smile. "Too late now. Read up. When I get back, I want to hear your plan." With a flash of his green cape, he was gone.

Lucia sighed and shook her head; there was youthful exuberance, and there was stupid. She was old enough to know the difference, but young enough to know that sometimes the best way to check which you were doing was to do it and pay close attention to what happened next.

"All right," she asked. "What have we got?"

Calill looked up from the sheaf of pages, which she had habitually already started reading. Her eyes contained the pure terror of discovering what you were up against, but her smile was still that of a deer that knows where the wolf sleeps. A deer that could cast Bolganone. "Everything, I think," she said.

* * *

_First things first_, thought Gatrie. _You are shackled and tied down, making escape utterly impossible. Come up with a plan to rectify this._ In the darkness of his impromptu prison, the general took a deep breath, flexed most every muscle he had conscious control over, and ripped apart his restraints with all the elegance of an elephant falling down a flight of stairs. _Okay, step two…_

There were only two places in the room where the slightest light was coming in; the edges of the door, and a covered window some feet above his head. With a leap, he grabbed hold of the curtain and let gravity do the work of tearing it down, but that didn't improve matters much. The window was barred, and so small he couldn't imagine anyone but Ilyana through it, or maybe Sothe–

He sighed, but it was a sign of Gatrie's resilience and intent that he quickly got past that thought. The window was not an escape route unless they equipped him with a pickaxe. What it did do was let in faint light; either night had almost fallen, or those distant clouds of the morning had rolled in and blocked the sun. It took him a little while to sort out the dim, irregular shapes scattered through the room, but eventually he realised that they had locked him in an armory. One from which all the weapons had been removed.

"That merc general really is a sadistic snake," he remarked under his breath, "but I can't fault her sense of irony." Locked as he was inside the mercenary guildhall – Gatrie was sure they hadn't moved him elsewhere, it would have been unnecessarily risky – and without his armor, he had no hope whatsoever of defeating every single soldier they could bring against him. The door would be easy enough to break down, but he had no weapons on hand, either.

They were inviting Gatrie to get himself killed, and if Sagita was the man Gatrie had estimated, he was rather hoping that bravery would overrun common sense. The only way to stay alive was to sit here, in a prison that couldn't hold him, and be an utter coward. If he had ever entertained thoughts of winning Astrid for himself, he had to realise that staying still, knowing her situation, would make him absolutely unworthy. The other option, of course, was being a very worthy corpse.

_Okay, Gatrie, they're playing psychology on you, so you throw psychology right back in their faces. The options are to be a coward, or be dead. They expect you to pick coward._ He thought about it more, and recalled that Fletcher Sagita was best referred to around the easily-offended as 'a right dastard'. _Fletcher probably expects you to pick dead. So he'll be ready for that, even if they aren't. How do you confuse this many people at once?_ His eyes set on a large cabinet, and started considering the value of insane boldness.

* * *

By the time Astrid returned to her room, the sun really was on its way to setting, but only the clock told her as much. The clouds were dark and already giant droplets were splashing on her windows. This was the much-trumped-up 'night before the wedding', since she had somehow never really got around to protesting since Fletcher's arrival. So. Tomorrow her arranged marriage would go through and the course of her life would forevermore be tied to House Ceffylau's needs.

In some ways, it was a relief. She would be accepted. She wouldn't have to worry about her reception at home. Wouldn't have to try every moment of every day to keep her parents happy or at least earn their respect. In exchange, she just had to hand over the vast majority of her freedom… but she knew Fletcher wouldn't abuse that power, even if it was legally his. Amazing. How could you get to know anyone so well in only two days?

The incidents with Calill and Lucia were unfortunate, though. She'd have words with Queen Elincia when she arrived for the wedding. See to it that Crimea kept to business that was actually its own. She wondered if the soldiers she had considered friends would be so easily turned on House Sagita–

"Nice place," said Sothe. "Servants aren't the most helpful, though." Astrid very nearly jumped out of her flesh, but located his voice in time to see the green-wrapped thief slip in through the window, lock it again, and hang his scarf up to dry, as though this were as normal as coming in through the front door. He saw her shock, and smiled. "How ya doing, Lady Astrid?"

"Sothe!" Astrid exclaimed, rushing across the room and hugging him fiercely. He let out a quiet yelp, as though he had brushed up against hot metal, and Astrid quickly withdrew. "Sothe, you're all flushed. Are you okay?"

"What? Ah… um, just a couple of nasty bruises," he said, quickly.

"You look like you were dragged head-first through a clotheswringer made from brambles," said Astrid. "Come on, I'll get you cleaned up."

"Oh, from _her_ I get maternal," Sothe muttered at the world. "I'll be fine. Besides, you never know when I'll have to make a quick getaway." He glanced meaningfully at the door.

"Hah. No one will bother me – at this point, I couldn't be less important to the proceedings," Astrid assured him. She stepped back, as if noticing the thief for the first time. "You've skyrocketed. You're as tall as me now."

"I was never that short," Sothe insisted, still grumbling in a way that Astrid knew not to take seriously. "It was an optical illusion."

"Fine," Astrid relented. She fell back onto a sofa – Sothe wondered how rich you had to be to start furnishing your bedroom – and let out a long sigh. "I can't tell you how good it is to see you. Calill and Lucia actually told me you were dead."

"I set them straight on that. I'd appreciate it if you didn't let it get around, though." Sothe could read the confusion in Astrid's look, edging on suspicion. Either she didn't know what he was implying, or she wasn't going to let herself know. "You still haven't answered my question."

"How am I?" she recalled. "I don't know if I know." Sothe didn't respond to this, except to shift to a slightly more comfortable position on the windowsill, forcing her to keep talking. "I never thought I'd go through with an arranged marriage, not after riding with Lord Ike and fighting off Daein's advance. But it all just seems so…"

"Easy?" Sothe suggested.

Astrid scowled at him without much malice. "Yes, I suppose so. Marrying Fletcher would be – will be – easy. And it would make everything else easy, too."

"Do you love him?"

"Can you love someone in just two days?" Astrid asked, half-rhetorically.

"You can love someone in a second," said Sothe, curling himself until the window frame held him like a rather blocky hammock. "The hard part is figuring out which second."

Astrid smiled. "That's a good line."

"Came up with it myself," said Sothe, smugly. "But how about you tell me about the _rest_ of your life first? I'd start, but with me, you know how it is. Thievery, backstabbing, smuggling – _snore_. Let's talk manners and protocols." Astrid burst out laughing. She had been missing this for a long time.

* * *

Two guards flanked the door to Gatrie's makeshift prison, and they had stopped talking now. In fact, since the mysterious tearing, breaking sound that immediately followed their discussion of whether or not they were allowed to kill him, both soldiers had kept perfectly still and quiet. Most unsettling of all was that the prisoner was remaining equally quiet. Still, neither of them wanted to ask the other what to do, because they might miss the important sound that would warn them something terrible was about to happen.

Possibly just to get break the thickening silence, an armoire smashed through the door and into the far wall, scattering fragments of wood through the hall. Lances already on guard, the soldiers leapt back down the corridor in both directions and waited for the general to emerge. He wasn't armoured, he couldn't be armed, they had the advantage – but he _had_ just hurled furniture at them, so he deserved some caution. Nevertheless, the stillness and silence returned.

They crept back to the door and peered into the darkness. Unspeakably horrible things failed to happen to either of them. In fact, when their eyes had adjusted to the shadows, they spotted Gatrie standing in the middle of the room. The arms of a chair hung from his wrists by shackles, and broken ropes were coiled at his feet. He waved, and the attached chain jingled.

They retreated out of sight again. "Do we attack?"

"We're supposed to leave him alive," said the other, shaking his head. "…He's not actually _doing_ anything."

"He threw an armoire at us! Well, at the door."

"Armoire in an armory," Gatrie called to them. "You've got to admit that's a little funny."

"I'll go check with the general–"

"And leave me to get crushed with crates? Not likely."

"Fine, you go, _I'll_ stay, just get moving." The intimidated soldier dashed away, relieved, while the other one peeked around the corner of the ruined door again. Gatrie was standing perfectly still in the darkness. He was smiling now. This made the effect worse, particularly because the smile was entirely without malice. Gatrie just looked like he was the only one in a crowded room who got the joke. Threats of violence would have been so much more straightforward.

"Ah… are you…?"

"Shhhh," Gatrie whispered, a finger at his lips. He went back to standing perfectly still in the darkness.

A minute later, the other general approached with a contingent of mercenaries behind her, pausing for an instant at the sound of a battle cry, then bursting into a full charge, signalling her orders with one hand. By the time they reached the makeshift prison, it was empty – or so it first seemed. Half of the soldiers remained in the hall; the rest searched the armory, leaping to surround one weapons locker when it mysteriously thumped. Someone axed off the lock and the door swung open, allowing the second guard to flop out of it, senseless. "Ow," he offered.

"Where did he go?" the general demanded.

"No, no… first pain, then talking…" the soldier groaned.

She pointed to a pair of her troops. "You two, get him to the infirmary; everyone else, full headquarters search, laguz protocols."

"You think this knight is a beast-man?" someone yelped.

"No, I just want the lunkish beggar _caught_. Get going." They filed out at full speed, not letting the crumpled wreck of the armoire hinder their pace in the least. The general waited for them to scatter, poked the now-unconscious guard with her foot, and took up a defensible position in the doorway, trying to watch the entire room at once. "All right. Have some courage. Wherever you're hiding, come on out."

Behind her, the fallen armoire silently rose to its feet and pounced like a predatory battering ram.

* * *

"Hey! We've been wondering where you were, Your Purple-Robeliness."

"Boyd? Surely you've got better things to do than pester me–"

"How's it goin', Soren?"

"Mm. You too. Well, Nephenee, I suppose I–"

"That's super. C'mon, we'll explain on the way."

"The way where? _Waaugh!_"

* * *

One thing that was incredibly easy to do in Astrid's room was to loll, which Sothe wasn't sure he had ever tried before. There was relaxing and stretching out and collapsing and lounging and sprawling, but lolling required a certain class – the ridiculously expensive class – of furniture, and then a look on one's face that guaranteed they had no idea how expensive it might be, or why it still wasn't comfortable.

"You don't have lessons on this sort of thing?" asked Sothe, after explaining the definition.

"No," Astrid insisted, shaking with loosely controlled laughter.

"Amazing that so many people can get it by instinct, then. It's always the same expression, like a concussed duck." He demonstrated. Astrid crumpled in laughter. "Or maybe more like…" Sothe tried again, making his air of bland, ego-fired superiority all the more outrageous and letting his eyes unfocus.

"Sothe… seriously, stop…" she choked out between giggling outbursts, "someone's going to hear _one_ of us."

"I don't have to. Thief rules. Now, it's even worse for the big, important lords," he went on. "Because they've all got that look like they're worried there's going to be a surprise quiz soon and everyone will find out they haven't had a clue what's been happening for the last twenty-six years." The thief puffed out his cheeks and went bug-eyed to a deranged degree; it was very deer-in-the-lamplights.

"Oh, be fair," said Astrid, despite her amusement. "They're not all like that."

"Name one."

"Lord Sagita."

"Back to him again, are we?"

"I'm just saying."

"Mm-hmm."

"All right," Astrid admitted. "I'm glad to see you. I was more than a little shaken up when Lucia and Calill said you were dead, and that Fletcher had somehow done it – well, I didn't believe them, but the possibility… And now that you're here, I know it's not true. So I suppose I'm not so worried about him. Maybe even warming up a little more–"

"Look, I never said it was for lack of trying."

Silence reigned as Astrid puzzled through the thief's interjection. Eventually, she came up with: "…What?"

"I'm not dead, but I don't think Fletcher knows it, and I intend to drag that out as long as possible. He _shot_ me. And he's got bloody good aim, too." Sothe's eyes went hard, daring Astrid to protest. She dared.

"Has everyone but me gone utterly insane?" Astrid demanded. "I'm surprised at you, Sothe; Gatrie is a, a bit of a spastically passionate man, and Lucia might care more about protecting Crimea from phantoms than what happens to my life, but you – _look like a corpse!_" Whatever the young noble might have intended to say, her exclamation was rewritten as Sothe opened his tunic.

He was lightly scarred, as expected of a professional amateur thief, but over his heart was a hideously abraded bruise, focused on an epicentre of pain that had thankfully, by now, stopped bleeding. There had been no cut; just a terribly _pointy_ impact. Astrid knew arrows inside and out – she greatly preferred 'out' – and had to admit that it was almost definitely an arrow wound.

"I think I liked it better when you were talking about my height," Sothe muttered.

"But why didn't it puncture?" she asked. The thief sighed and opened the layers of his tunic – his usual green, folds of silk, a thin set of chain mail, more silk. It was the best armor you would wear against arrows without strapping on a wall. The silk fibres were strong and tangled the arrow, while the tight-looped twists of chain mail bunched up on impact, catching the arrowhead and gripping it more firmly the harder it hit.

"I just took the hit and played dead," said Sothe. "Fletcher's lackeys had a little more emotion in the things they use instead of hearts than Sagita did, so they just left me there instead of doing disposal duty. Waited for nightfall to move. Spent a day crawling back into the city without being seen by anyone. You know the drill."

Astrid stared, forgetting to blink. "Took the hit," she muttered. She was standing in front of a boy who had held his ground in front of an archer, had trusted in woven silk and steel to keep him alive so he could bring down an evil– "No. No, I don't, I can't…"

"Fine."

"_What?_"

"Fine," Sothe repeated. "If you're not going to believe me now, you won't later, so I'm not going to argue. Tell me more about huge frilly dresses that look like wedding cakes and cakes that look like turrets based on dresses." Astrid didn't say anything; just sat in one of her chairs and stared at the floor. Sothe gave her a moment before pressing on. "…You're not the same either. I should have hung around Begnion more since the war. I can't imagine what's happened."

"This place is a prison," said Astrid. "As much as anywhere Daein tried to lock us up or lure and ambush us, only the jailors are my family. I can't fight them, so there's no way out."

"Oh," said Sothe. He thought _Oh_ too, but a rather more meaningful and richly nuanced version.

"And I don't know if I can trust anyone any more, so I don't see why you're trustworthy, either."

"Because I am," the thief replied. "And you know it. You've told me everything that you can't say to anyone else. I don't work like other people and you know that, too."

"…I wish everything were the way it used to be. At least in the war we were allowed to fire at the bad guys and then go back to camp and just talk. None of this nonsense with nobles and alliances and betrothal contracts. Horses, arrows, and warm tents with hot chocolate."

"Would I have to be short again?" asked Sothe, deadpan. Astrid stared at him askew, then laughed again.

"Nah," said Astrid. "It suits you."

* * *

Soren stormed into Calill's home without any preamble and without any satisfaction, either. His robes swirled with mystic style appropriate to a sage, only making him look slightly supremely evil. "Oh, good. Sane people. Well. Sane person," he amended, nodding to Lucia. "Boyd and Nephenee have been utterly unhelpful so far. They're making it sound like we have to stop a wedding because the groom is secretly an antique-thief or an assassin or something. Have I really stumbled into that kind of romantic schlock? It sounds like one of those awful novels Marcia is constantly devouring."

Lucia and Calill looked at each other.

"I like him," Calill remarked.

"Definitely," the swordmaster agreed.

Soren took a stance that conjured images of peasants and minions supplicating themselves at his feet, which was actually meant to show that he was listening carefully. Calill explained, having to back up more than once, and frequently interrupted by Lucia, describing the last two days. Then she handed over the papers Sothe had delivered, which Soren blitzed through gratefully.

"Shouldn't Boyd and Nephenee be here to tell him about finding and losing the pendant thing?" asked Lucia. "I wouldn't want to skip important details."

"Don't know," said Calill, picking up pages as Soren cast them aside and reading through again. "Wandered off. Boyd probably needs a roast chicken or the like to snack on."

She was about right; he was raiding her kitchen, though baked goods were the casualties of the day. No cinnamon-raisin loaf was safe. Nephenee, rather than watch the grim spectacle, was picking candles out of the cupboards in preparation for a night that she felt sure was going to be full of planning. Plotting. Even scheming, if necessary.

"Ya'd think a pyro like Calill'd keep her matches close at hand," Nephenee mused. "Then again, guess she prob'ly doesn' need 'em often."

"Neat freak, too," Boyd observed, inexplicably pausing mid-feast. "Nice stone floors, yes, but look how polished they are." Without much effort, he pushed off one counter and slid across to the other pantry, spinning as he went. Nephenee grinned and skated past him, catching herself on the preserves pantry.

"Slick," she confirmed, and launched again, noticing too late that Boyd was doing the same. They crashed quite gracefully, managing to grab hold of each other's arms and twirl to steadiness.

Their eyes met in silence. "Fhall we danf?" Boyd suggested around a particularly cinnamony slice.

In the other room, the soldiers had been quickly forgotten again. "All right. I think I'm caught up," said Soren. "This noble, Fletcher Ceffylau, is looking to get married and ascend to Lord of his House. He's also got an obsession with archery, and somewhere he read a legend about an ancient bow of devastating might, so like any slightly unhinged power-wonk, he tried to build another one."

"That'd explain the workshop and all the books," Lucia agreed. "Sothe was a lot better at investigating this stuff than we were."

"At least you didn't have to fake your death to do it," Soren remarked. "Now, that didn't work out, making a new one, but then he determined that the original Bow of Falling Stars hadn't been destroyed so much as disassembled, and that Begnion was hiding it. He hired mercenaries to do the actual stealing, and we know they got the string off that medallion–"

"–Which we're sure is actually the bowstring," Lucia added. "But they never saw them get a bow or anything out of the building. I suppose they could have done some sneaking we didn't find out about."

"Or they could have slipped it out right in front of you," said Soren. "I recall something about a breaking window attracting Boyd and Nephenee's attention? From the way you described the battle, Gatrie was too far away to have thrown the urn through it, and holding his lance in any case. Also, why risk attracting attention, which they did? Simple answer is that big urns hold things."

Lucia slapped her forehead. "Stash the bow in the urn, throw it out the window, pick it up later when things have quieted down and no one's paying attention. Blast."

"It's only a guess," said Soren. "But it would mean that they've got the whole weapon, and I suspect Fletcher has the skill to properly reconstruct it, even if there's a trick to the job. Considering the power it's supposed to have – if Sothe's found real information, and not some overblown delusion – I think we can feel lucky that everything in the city is still standing, but Sagita's supposed to be planning to rule Begnion. I think the Apostle, for one, wouldn't approve."

"He'll have a fine time trying to get to her inside the palace, superweapon or not," Lucia scoffed.

"Oh, blast…" said Soren, rereading one of the last cryptic notes Sothe had scribbled down. _Re: dead Apostle – every good trap needs bait that doesn't look like bait._ "How obvious could it get?"

* * *

Sanaki looked up from her meditation lantern and waited politely for the servant to speak. This always unnerved them, which she had to privately admit tended to be hilarious. The quiet could stretch on for quite some time before they gathered the courage to speak and discovered that they wouldn't be instantly executed. "Ah… Your Holiness? The tailor-master would like to know if you have decided what you would like to wear to the ceremony."

The Apostle mused for a moment. "Something simple and red; make sure it is not meant to show off." The servant bowed deeply and slipped away so fast there was a quiet sonic boom. _I'd rather not attract too much attention, and certainly have no interest in distracting from the bride._ She shook her head and laughed. _A marriage between House Sagita and House Ceffylau after all these generations of tension. Could anything else in Begnion so surely demand I make an appearance outside the palace?_ Unlike Soren, the thought immediately drifted out of her head as she returned to marvelling at the radiance of the flame.

* * *

"I'm glad we got to talk like this one last time," said Astrid. Sothe was back on the windowsill, curled in hammock-mode again. He looked somewhat more distant now, as though his mind were puzzling through an especially mighty riddle on another continent. "And I'm glad you came back."

"Yeah," the thief agreed. "I shouldn't have left for so long."

"…Will you be there tomorrow?"

Sothe fixed her with his usual amused stare. "Astrid, what do you really think the chances are that you'd ever see _me_ in a room full of upper-class Begnion lunatics?" She nearly laughed, but couldn't quite find the enthusiasm.

"If everything you said was true, why did you stop arguing?" she asked. "Why not press the point and prove it?"

"Because I'd rather shut up and be in here than sit out in the rain and be right," Sothe replied, sliding out of place and standing again. "And because I think tonight you needed to talk more than listen."

"I've _been_ talking for hours," Astrid muttered, rolling her eyes.

"Yeah," Sothe agreed. "And now I've got to get going."

"It's still raining out there."

"I persevere. Compared to getting shot, really, how bad can it be?" he asked, spreading his arms.

"Sothe…"

"Sorry. It's true."

"_Sothe!_"

"I'm going already, you won't have to put up with any more arguments. Just one other thing I'd like you to know." Utterly calm, as always, he stepped forward and his outstretched arms wrapped around Astrid, sliding across her back to hold her close, and kissed her, soft as an avalanche of pillows. Astrid didn't spend any time shocked, nor did she resist, but rather enjoyed it for all it was, all he meant. The scent of the rain had slipped in through the window, folding around them.

He parted from her, stepped back. Astrid still said nothing, just waited for the desperate argument she knew was going to follow. It wasn't honestly all that unexpected, but to think she was going to have to turn him away again, now, in the middle of such a wracking ordeal–

"Good night, Lady Astrid," he said, and escaped through the window. The lock clicked; Astrid didn't bother wondering how he had managed to lock it again from the outside. Thief rules. They made the world an incredible hassle, sometimes.


	6. And In The Radiance Bind Them

**(Author's Note: **I HAVE RETURNED. And I brought a new chapter with me. For anyone curious, now that university's all but let out, I'll be adding the finale to this story next, then finishing up the FE8 story Cascade (really I will) and probably adding a new short story set during FE9, two or three chapters, tentatively titled 'Fever Dreams'. Expect weirdness.)

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter Six: And In The Radiance Bind Them**

Philosophers were a bunch of freaking liars. When they were right, it was only by coincidence, like now, in the hours before sunrise, when stormclouds hung over Begnion like a funeral shroud and blocked out the light. Philosophers – one of them, anyway – had said that it was always darkest before the dawn, and they were right_ this_ time, but on any other day, any normal day, the sky wouldn't be at its darkest right now. More than a little, Sothe suspected it was a metaphor for something. He didn't care what.

"On the plus side, I don't have a life, so it can't be in shambles," he remarked to the streetlamp. Streetlamps! Lights in the street in the middle of the night, despite the storm. Unheard-of anywhere else in the world. At least, anywhere he had heard of. The irony was somewhat offensive.

'It's always darkest before the dawn'. When coincidence _didn't_ go their way, philosophers were, as has already been noted, a useless bunch of prevarication peddlers. 'Truth is beauty, and beauty, truth' sounded wonderful until put into practice, at which point it ended with the secret love of your life marrying a megalomaniacal nobleman murderer. …Well, maybe not every time.

So what _did_ Sothe have going for him? A cutting intellect and roguish good looks? An unparalleled opportunity to be miserable for the rest of his life, which would last until he really _was_ killed on a selfless mission of greater good? What in the world did he care?

_Hmm_… They also said 'the truth shall set you free'. Rolling that one around his head, he had to admit that it seemed to work. He had nothing holding him here now, nor anywhere else. Sothe honestly didn't care what happened to the Begnion kingdom's nobility – it wasn't likely to become even _less_ fair just because a power-wonk took over. That meant his contract with Gatrie was done, because he decided it was done, and Astrid obviously didn't want his help, if she could act like that after he got shot.

Sothe looked down the empty road in both directions and realised that his life was his own again, and this time he wasn't stuck in Daein.

"That's it for me, then," he muttered, and started walking.

* * *

Soren sat in the darkness, staring at the insides of his eyelids and inhaling the faint scent of cinder and wax. Gatrie had been the last to fall asleep, no more than an hour earlier, and he had doused the candles first, but without enough skill to prevent them from pluming with smoke. It was a little thing, but it was Gatrie all over – rush to fix the problem, then think about it, then find allies, then figure out who you would need as allies, then find _them_, then get _them_ to think about it, and at some point possibly think about considering the consequences, but decide against it as a waste of time. 

The truth was that Soren didn't know politics well enough to make a legal argument to prevent the wedding, and although Sothe had gathered most everything that anyone still knew about the Bow of Falling Stars, there was no mention of a weakness. He didn't know what Sagita wanted with Astrid. There was nothing they could do except try to be ready to react to anything.

Sanaki's life was the cost if they weren't.

The option that he hadn't mentioned to the others – and only Soren was pragmatic enough to think of it anyway – was that they were about to be severely disappointed. If he and Sothe were right, and Fletcher wanted the wedding as an opportunity to kill the Apostle, then they needed to be in perfect form. They would also need to be _everywhere_, and that was especially a big problem, because Sagita undoubtedly had dozens, even hundreds of guards, and they could all be called in. Regicides didn't do anything halfway, and it would be easy for a single killer to reach Sanaki if a melee broke out.

But if Fletcher was a patient maniac, then nothing at all would happen tomorrow, nor the day after. Not the week after, the month after, then one spring or fall afternoon he would drop by the palace to request Imperial Authority for some land-zoning matter, no one would expect the blade in his belt, and the Apostle would die. With the restored Bow of Falling Stars, House Sagita would undoubtedly emerge from the ensuing chaos as rulers.

"The only thing that makes me think he won't do that is that Sigrun would probably put her lance through his face before he escaped the room," Soren muttered. He rubbed at the Brand on his forehead; as a child he had thought it was the source of all headaches.

"Good thing too," Nephenee mumbled. Soren's eyes snapped open – wasn't she asleep? In the window-filtered starlight he could see her still slumped over the table, across from Boyd. Still soundly unconscious. "Lances fer all of 'em. Bloody waffles. Donchu talk smack 'bou' me, I'll fill ya wi' syrup like a, a, an Archsage wi' _oranges_. Fluorescent ones. Oh, ya got friends? Ya think I ain't got friends? Come back 'n' talk t' me when you ain't delicious."

The sage stared at her, watching these thoughts fall into place and the epiphany that blossomed from them. Slowly, Soren leaned across the table. "…No one can _ever_ know about this," he whispered.

"Snnrrrgh."

* * *

Hours past, dawn arrived, and the clouds finally flew past, bathing the capital of Begnion in sunlight for miles around. It was the most beautiful day in months, and it was the day of Astrid's wedding. She walked through the grass, letting its feathered tips tickle her ankles, and realised she was thinking about it as though the world was due to end at one o'clock. _Which it isn't_, she thought sharply. 

"I knew you'd be out here," said Fletcher, appearing from between the trees. "You really enjoy this archery range, don't you? We'll have to come here often."

"I'm just talking a walk, not practicing," said Astrid. "If bizarre traditions say the wedding procession has to begin outside the city, we might as well enjoy the surroundings. Speaking of which–"

"Traditions also say I shouldn't see you before the ceremony, yes. I looked that one up and found it only applies for four hours; we're quite free to do whatever we want until nine. For instance, if there's anything you'd like to talk about…?" he asked, without much subtlety.

"It seems to me we're about to have a great deal of time in which to talk about anything in the world," Astrid replied. Fletcher bit his lip awkwardly, and she wondered if that was some kind of 'tell'. She'd need to start learning those things. Makalov always pushed his hair behind his ears before settling into a particularly fantastical lie, and Sothe– "Did _you_ have something you wanted to get off your chest?"

Fletcher hemmed for a moment, then laughed at the surprise on Astrid's face. "No, my dear, I have something much more tangible in mind." Astrid frowned, wondering what direction the conversation was going, and then he produced a gleaming curve from behind his back: a longbow. Astrid took it almost reverently from his hands, stroking the sleek golden wood. She tapped the string with a finger; it looked old, somehow, but it was in perfect condition.

"The craftsmanship is incredible," she remarked. "Where did you get it?"

"I wish I could say I made it, but the parts had to be gathered from elsewhere," Fletcher replied. "Try it." He waved at one of the nearest targets and offered Astrid an arrow. Smoothly she nocked, aimed, and loosed the shot – an exact bullseye. Fletcher smiled and offered her another arrow. This one landed in the centre of a more distant target; Astrid had to arc her shot higher to cover the distance, but the bow was perfectly balanced for such use.

"It's wonderful," Astrid declared.

"How about that one?" Fletcher suggested, pointing at a target that seemed ridiculously distant. Still, given the power and flex of the bow, it was worth an arrow. Astrid was so impressed that she didn't notice the quiver of anticipation in his fingers when she took the third bolt from her fiancée's hand. In proper form, she nocked it and drew back before swinging the bow upward, high enough that the long arc might reach the distant mark.

As the arrow's angle approached vertical, Astrid felt faint warmth under her fingers, and then in a flash it turned to a thin line of electric blue, humming a major triad. She let go in surprise and the bolt soared into the sky at an impossible speed, vanishing in an instant – and only an instant later an echo of the shot returned, blazing bright and moving so fast it left firework after-images in the air.

It fell on the target, which was lost to an eruption of wind and azure fire. There would have been smoke, undoubtedly, but sheer force blew it away instantly, leaving the ruined impact site clearly visible. It looked like a cake struck with a forge-hot sledgehammer. Eventually Astrid remembered to blink. Wordlessly, she accepted another arrow and fired it in a high arc. As before, the bolt turned to pure power before she had even let go, and the result was much like a meteor strike.

"What in the world _is_ this?" Astrid demanded, only now realising that Fletcher was staring at her intently.

"The Bow of Falling Stars," he said simply. "An unparalleled weapon, in the hands of a true master archer. You can't imagine how pleased I am to see that it works."

"It's terrifying," said Astrid, frowning in confusion.

"Would you like to try it again?" he suggested.

"I don't think so," she said slowly. "I've never heard of such a creation – I'd feel better if we spoke to the royal scholars first. …Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Simple fascination," Fletcher replied smoothly. "Incidentally, do you think this cologne is too strong?" Instead of another arrow, he proffered a scented kerchief. Still immensely baffled, Astrid held the cloth to her face, inhaled – and gently toppled sideways. Fletcher shook his head in wonderment. "Chloroform is a truly _glorious_ thing."

* * *

In the brief haven of the alley, Gatrie tried to decide whether or not it was worth putting the door back in place. The mercenaries' guild had a policy about strong locks on their doors, but in this case they had forgotten about strong hinges, too. He hadn't even needed to tackle it; just a slow, steady exertion had worked the screws loose from the old wood. After a moment, he decided to leave the door where it lay. 

The hostage was a different matter. "Now, listen," he told the woman, whose glare was quite expressive above her gag. "You joked about Sothe being dead, so if I ever decide you're being more troublesome than you're worth, you die. That's my policy with evil people; you'll understand if I don't apologise." He undid the gag, his glare daring her to call for soldiers.

"You idiot, I'm working for the Apostle," she snapped with surprising restraint.

"Oh, of course. It's so obvious," Gatrie sneered. "Tell me where the stolen loot went."

"If I knew, do you think I'd be here? I'm waiting in case someone contacts us again – whoever's stealing artefacts from the Begnion reliquary isn't going to stop with a vase and a talisman, and when they hire us again, I'm not going to miss the chance to track them–"

"Either you think I'm a complete idiot…" Gatrie began.

"I haven't ruled that out, no," the woman snapped.

"…Or you're honestly a very good actor and a terrible spy," he finished. "Is it _possible_ that you could be an undercover soldier and not have realised yet that Fletcher Sagita is your megalomaniac employer?"

"Sagita?!" she blurted. "As in 'House Sagita' Sagita? Are you mad? He's in line to join the Imperial Court in a few years; why would he risk it by stealing from the reliquary?" Her face went oddly rigid as she said this; the impression was that at any moment she might go teeth-first for his neck.

Gatrie was horrified, mostly because her sudden changes in demeanour were so thorough that at least one of them _had_ to be an act, and if she could act that well, it made claims about spying a lot more plausible. He decided to let things play out a little more. "House Sagita is going to try to take over Begnion from the top down. But your underlings didn't steal the talisman, just the string it was on. Why don't you know that?"

"Our employer – or at least the envoys he sent – was stingy with information. Only a few of our company were told precisely what we were stealing, and they apparently got paid enough to stay quiet. Look, who in blazes are you and why should I tell you anything about the workings of the Apostle's intelligence service?"

"I'm Gatrie of the Greil Mercenaries" – her flicker of shock told him she recognised _that_ name – "and I'm a lot better at your job than you are. Why should I trust you? The Apostle should have better agents than this."

"I'm… new," she said. "My name's Hayley – don't tell _me_ it's a bad name for a fearless mercenary captain; I've been known around here as Hail for at least a decade now. I got sick of the sellsword life, so I applied to the imperial army, got picked up by the spy service and put back out here to watch for suspicious mass-contracts."

Gatrie considered this. It would explain a lot if she were a former-mercenary-now-undercover-mercenary-spy. For example, it would explain why this was giving him a terrible headache. More importantly, if she was put out here because of her past and not her skills, it was no surprise that she hadn't caught up with Sagita yet. The man was like a snake in a vat of jelly, only slipperier.

"All right," he decided, and pulled loose the knots around her hands. "For the moment, I'm going to act like I believe all of this, but I might as well say flat-out that I couldn't be more sceptical if you told me you were the Apostle's twin sister. I don't have any proof that you're not one of Sagita's best personal guards spinning a nice little _gaiden_ for me so I can get suckerpunched again when I'm not expec–"

Hail cut him off in mid-cynic by producing a small cloth and rubbing it against her forehead firmly. Some of the skin turned pink with scrubbing, but in the middle it stayed artificially 'natural' until the carefully-treated masquing came off and revealed the Brand below. Gatrie stuttered to a stop. "Okay… so maybe you're not likely to work directly for a noble house."

"I should bloody well think not," Hail agreed.

"Doesn't mean I trust you."

"Fine. I still think I've met court jesters stealthier than you, so shut up about my spying skills. I'm used to field scouting, not espionage," she countered. Gatrie prepared to snap something back, but Hail wasn't finished: "Also… I'm sorry about the boy. I didn't know anything about him – it was just part of the act." After a moment's steady stare, Gatrie looked away and let it go.

"I guess charging into an enemy stronghold really didn't get me anywhere after all." He reconsidered. "Actually… you were ordered to keep me locked up how long? All day, wasn't it?"

"At minimum," Hail agreed. "We were told to expect an update by midnight."

"Heh. I was right, then: Sagita wants me to miss the wedding. That's a start, then; Ike always said that when you don't have a plan, the next best thing is doing whatever your enemy _doesn't_ want. I don't like a whole lot of improvising, but once we can get into position – blast." Gatrie thumped his hand against the alley wall and recoiled quickly from the bruising impact; bricks hurt a lot more when all your armor was in the hands of mercenaries.

"What is it?" Hail asked. "Ten seconds' planning makes you dizzy?"

"Can we cut out the personal attacks? I'm trying to get stuff _done_ here, and I have no idea where the wedding is going to be."

"You didn't get an invitation?"

"No! And what, you did?"

"Of course not," said Hail, uncomfortably. "But it's a wedding between two of Begnion's major noble houses. Standard operating procedure… uh, _etiquette_ says it has to be held in the Great Hall of Heroes or risk officially Offending both families, and there's all sorts of legal garbage that follows. …Look, I've lived in this city all my life; I do know a thing or two about the way it works."

"All right. When you storm a building, do you prefer kicking in the front door or the back?"

"I'm not storming anywhere! What does it even matter that he doesn't want you at this wedding?"

Gatrie fumbled. Hail might really be an agent of the Apostle, but she also had her mercenary cover to maintain, and unless he could convince her that bringing down Sagita was the same thing as solving the reliquary thefts, he was about to get a building full of angry people with pointy objects called down on his head. "Well… ah, the Apostle will be there too, won't she? For such an important wedding?"

"I suppose so," Hail agreed slowly.

"I think Sagita's going to try to have her killed," he blurted. _What the hell, it could happen._

"He's _what_?!" she demanded.

"You heard me," said Gatrie, settling into this story more comfortably. "It's a trap. Now, are you going to show me the way to this place so we can put a stop to it, or do we just sit here in an alley and hope everything turns out bloody daffodils?"

"You have no invitation; we'll never get inside the Hall of Heroes as walk-ins off the street," Hail insisted, forcing Gatrie to hide a smile. For the moment, panic had replaced suspicion. His amusement faltered a little when he noticed how she was looking him over with a critical eye, but then she snapped her fingers. "I've got something, I think. But we'll need much better clothes than this, and some cosmetics couldn't hurt either."

"Hey, when it comes to looking good, I'm always covered," said Gatrie. "Follow me."

* * *

Astrid awoke in a chair that silently asked the world 'Who needs to be comfortable when you can be flimsy and ridiculously expensive?' Naturally, this meant she was back in her own familiar House Ceffylau, and that made the presence of armed soldiers all around her even more noticeable. None of them were frilled in lace, for starters. They clashed with the décor something awful. 

"Feeling all right?" Fletcher asked, when her eyes managed to focus on him standing nearby. He was definitely doing his best to look suave and daring, and she hated that he was good at it. "Whatever else happens today, I don't want you to get the idea that I don't care about you. I do. I'm looking forward to our marriage. But there are _other_ considerations as well."

"Nngh," she groaned and rubbed her temples. Fletcher frowned and snapped his fingers; a servant placed a glass of water at her side instantly.

"I begin to understand why you can use the Bow of Falling Stars and I cannot," he went on. "It reminds me of an ancient scroll I once read, some kind of philosophical musing on the warrior spirit. They said that in mastery of a weapon, the true warrior goes through phases of understanding – first in wielding the sword, learning its motion and technique, and these warriors can be formidable opponents. But then there is a greater level of knowledge, wherein the warrior understands the nature of all weapons and it doesn't matter what he wields, because the shape can change but its essence does not."

Astrid was barely listening, she was too busy choking water down her parched throat and trying to understand why her mother was looking so concerned. Astrid was awake and plainly ready to get married; what else did she want from her daughter at a time like this?

Fletcher had been speaking to the air until now, admiring the tapestries in the hall and the metalwork of the chandelier overhead, but now he turned to face his fiancée, and his eyes were… intense. Too much so. "I dare say I've come that far, but you are a true master. At the third tier, the warrior himself becomes his weapon, and the barriers between them are gone. That is what the Bow of Falling Stars demands. A perfect unity and trust, with the two acting in perfect harmony, and only then can you find the strength that you need to fire."

Astrid's mother really did look distressed. It was vaguely refreshing, although Astrid felt guilty about thinking so. Maybe she was actually showing some concern for her daughter? Well, it was about time. Now that she could think straight, what was pestering from the back of her mind? Oh, _right_…

"Where the devil did you put that thing?" Astrid demanded. She considered leaping up, but the massed soldiers looked like the only question at their recruitment interview was 'how menacingly can you hold a pike?' That and blood was still pounding in her head.

"Not really one for poetic discourse, are you?" asked Fletcher, smiling. "It's in a safe place for now. I'd love to see you use it more; it's like art. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let's conquer the world together."

Astrid would have gaped, but she was too deeply aware that doing so would be unladylike. "What in the world are you talking about?"

"Well, not the _whole_ world, but really, no one can stand against Begnion, especially with the Bow. We might as well hold the throne of all Tellius. The question is whether or not you'll help me revolutionise the country after the Apostle is gone. You know how she works, dear Astrid. Political games at court! I was there when she mocked Princess Elincia before the Daein War. And I saw her sit idle as that wretched Oliver traded freely in laguz slaves. Don't you think you'd make a better empress?"

That was a stunning question, considering how casually he asked. Astrid _had_ thought to herself countless times that the nobility could actually be a body of worthwhile rulers if they just had different laws to work in and fewer bloody stupid rituals and pretences and painfully shallow lives. It wasn't hard to see where Fletcher was going with his speech, and Astrid was fascinated. If anything could make the Apostle step down, being threatened with an unstoppable ultrasonic celestial blast had to be it.

An instinct or two still spoke up. She also let a hint of a smile show, and Fletcher didn't bother hiding any of his satisfaction at that. "And what if I'm not quite convinced by this lovely dream-world you're painting for me?"

"Well, I would so enjoy taking all the time that I need to assure you that it can be much more than dreams, but the fact of the matter is that this afternoon is the best chance we'll have for a _very_ long time, so I have to settle for the practical solution," Fletcher replied. He nodded at his nearest attendant, who drew a wickedly sharp stiletto and held it, steady as a stone, to her mother's neck. "Either the Apostle dies or your mother does. I don't think I need to tell you how much I'd prefer the first option."

_You're not the same either,_ Sothe had said. _I should have hung around Begnion more since the war. I can't imagine what's happened._ Astrid had to admit he was right. Her family, the city, the nobility, this betrothal, they had all come together to crush her down, until she stopped wanting to fight back because all that mattered was getting through the next day. Enduring. She had become passive, thinking that maybe life would get better when her nerves went dead and she stopped caring. This new Astrid was weak. She would even take orders from this man, who spoke of ruling the nation by killing its child-empress, and would kill another innocent woman if she refused. The new Astrid didn't know how to cope with it all.

The hell with that.

The new Astrid was dead. Gone. A memory, and not a happy one at that.

Astrid Ceffylau, Archer-Paladin of the Greil Mercenaries and heroine of the Daein War, knew exactly who she was, what she was doing, and who she would take orders from, and it wasn't him.

"Don't worry about that," she lied smoothly. "I'm with you on this one."

"Of course you aren't," said Fletcher shaking his head with a laugh. He motioned again and the attendant holding Astrid's mother hostage stepped away. "But do come along anyway. We don't want to be late for the ceremony."

"About that," Astrid asked. "Isn't the procession supposed to begin outside the city?"

"Please. That one is practically a _gift_."

* * *

Sigrun frowned at Soren, whose mild disappointment was radiating an aura of terror throughout the small crowd. "I don't suppose I need to tell you that this does not help your case," she remarked. They both looked at the caravan of ornate carriages, which Sigrun had stopped at the city gates by the sage's request. Even now Begnion guards were rooting through their interior, looking for the concealed weaponry that Soren had claimed would be inside, while a handful of Sagita servants milled about anxiously. 

A balloon drifted his way; Soren batted it off with a swat. Roughly a skajillion of the brightly-coloured globes had come bouncing out when the Begnion guards had thrown open the carriage's doors, and even now the last few dozen were being chased down by a squadron of fleet-footed pages.

"To be honest, I didn't think it would be as easy as that anyway. You can't just take my word for it that Sagita is going to try to kill the Apostle at this wedding?" Soren asked.

"Officially, no, the politics would be… disastrous if you were wrong. Or if you were right and the – assassins, let us call them – simply postponed their plans. Hypothetically speaking." The Pegasus commander shook her head.

"Hypothetical." Soren batted off another balloon; the faint static aura of his Elthunder tome seemed to be attracting them.

"Yes. We'll have to let them continue on their way, but I will make sure I have riders on the lookout," Sigrun assured him.

"No…" Soren muttered. "No, they'd just be in greater danger from a weapon like this."

"If it is only a single weapon you are concerned by, surely–"

"Believe me when I say nothing about anything today is _sure_," said the sage, and sighed.

Twenty feet away, two workers wearing House Sagita uniforms slipped out of the alley, between two of the carriages, and paused to see if anyone had noticed. At least, Nephenee was looking to see if anyone had noticed; Boyd was studying Sigrun and Soren with a critical eye.

"Look clear to ya?" Nephenee whispered.

"There…" said the warrior. Nephenee followed the line of his finger to the commander and sage. "Is that… wet-blanket-flirting? I mean, they've got about an eighth of a romantic instinct between them, but–"

"Answers're 'nah' an' 'shut up', respectivelike," said Nephenee, and hauled him inside the carriage.

"This is obviously a dead end," said Soren. He lowered his voice to add "And they just got in."

"Do me a favour and do not create any unnecessary havoc just because you can," Sigrun said.

"I can't speak for the others. Personally, I always restrict myself to necessary havoc," he said

"That is not comforting." The sage spun away, his violet robes sweeping with them the last vestiges of hope that remained in the hearts of mortals. At least, they looked like they should. Sigrun adjusted her helmet, wondering what she had just assisted them in, and addressed the crowd. "I offer the Apostle's apologies that you were so disturbed; please relay them to Lord Sagita when you reach the Hall of Heroes. Good day to you all."

Eventually they got rolling again, with Nephenee and Boyd largely obscured from view by the balloons that had been packed inside. "Anything?" Boyd asked.

"Oh, now tha' Sigrun's gone ye're Mister-Down-Ta-Business, are ya?" Nephenee inquired.

"Hey, I was paying attention before! I just thought it was funny! She's entirely not my type, she's just so… _refined_, plainly can't relax, and really, I… I…" Boyd stammered to a halt and frowned, which cracked Nephenee's thus-far-stable mask. "…You're having me on, aren't you?"

"I like it when ye're flustered," she explained, grinning. "Blushin' matches yer hair."

"Did you see anything or not?" Boyd demanded, ignoring the rising heat in his face. "Whoever put these balloons here has obviously got some kind of dementia, but it's not really proof of Evil."

"No hint's fer where th' Bow is, if ya mean that," said the halberdier, shaking her head.

"At least we've still got the backup plan, whatever that's worth. Soren sure seemed happy about the idea, though. Did you hear him muttering about waffles this morning?"

"I stopped askin' the world to make sense 'round about two nights ago. Ya s'pose Gatrie's ever gonna come back?"

"Considering the funk he was in yesterday, I think the best we can hope for is that he's been distracted for a while by a gorgeous woman. …In the opinions of other people. Not me."

"Boyd?"

"Yeah?"

"We got somethin' like ten minutes 'fore we get to th' big Hall place. You gonna kiss me or not?"

* * *

Orange wasn't something Mia could give up lightly. It was her colour. She blazed out on battlefields like a beacon, which some people said was risky, but with her aptitude for getting in the first strike, luring in plenty of opponents was hardly a bad thing. She preferred to think of her usual garb like a fatally poisonous frog or butterfly's colours – eye-catching, perhaps, but also a huge screaming warning of imminent doom. 

In contrast, the dress Calill had supplied for her was purple. A pale, cloudy purple, somewhere between lilacs and summer dusk. It didn't scream _anything_. Mia was a woman who liked her clothes to make a statement, and that statement was supposed to be 'YAARGH, prepare to have your extremities chopped off'. Even Ilyana, for all her terrifying obsessing, couldn't manage purple as the hue of fear.

The shortened version of all this is to say that Gatrie did not select a good moment to barge in. "Okay, if what I saw the other day was anything – oh my, um, wow, sorry, not looking, just stand over there, thanks Mia, no, not near the mirror, thank you – then we should be able to find whatever you want in here – oh, right, Mia: Hail, she's a terrible spy, Hail: Mia, she's lightning death – and Calill will just have to forgive us for permanently borrowing a window curtain or two."

"How do you do that and not pass out? Do you have gills?" Hail suggested. She caught a glimpse of Mia retreating behind a folding screen. "Was that orange–"

"Pretty much everything, yeah. She tried to dye her hair once, too. Came out black. She didn't much mind getting confused with Soren, but the sage? Wow. Touchy about 'she', let me tell you."

"Are you on some kind of sugar rush?" asked the general.

"Hey, the wedding starts in, what, an hour? I have places to go and a 'noble' traitor to kill. Elegant up already." He gestured at the whole room that Calill had specialised for wedding preparations; the cosmetics table looked like a mad alchemist's workshop _after_ a catastrophic explosion. Hail scanned the various concoctions and handed a jar of eyeshadowing-something to Gatrie. "Uh, you didn't say anything about us _both_ dressing as–"

"Your _face_," she explained, coating a fingertip and drawing it across his cheek, leaving a long blue stripe.

"I knew that." He went to work himself, letting Hail get back to choosing her outfit.

Mia peeked over the top of the screen. "Um, not to pry, but are we getting dressed for the same thing?"

"Depends," said Hail, searching for a cloak that managed to be formal without falling prey to Begnion's occasional fanaticism for ridiculous ornamentation. "Are you going to an assassination attempt on the holy leader of the most powerful continent of Tellius?"

"…No," Mia replied. "Are you going to Astrid Ceffylau's wedding?"

"Yep," Gatrie confirmed. He glanced at himself in the mirror. "I should be tanner." A large powder puff struck with ninja precision; he barely managed to close his eyes in time. "Yeah, that's it. You're sure you're going to leave the Brand showing? There's still a lot of bigotry out there…"

"Then you'd better be a good growler. Whose plan is this, again?" Hail demanded.

"…Yours…"

"Mm-hmm. So get out of the room and get into character – no one's going to believe I'm your Branded bodyguard unless they start out believing you're exiled Gallia royalty," she commanded.

"If you were any less a harsh vessel of insecurity and hostility, the whole take-charge thing would be hot," Gatrie informed her, already moving quickly for the door.

Mia slid back down behind the screen again and stared at the lilac dress. She really needed to find a different place to stay whenever she was in Begnion. Somewhere more peaceful, like the basement of a heavily guarded warehouse, or the Guild of Thieves and Brigands. Lucia probably didn't have to put up with this sort of madness.

* * *

"This is absolute madness," the swordmaster grumbled, clinging to the parapet and staring down at Sagita servants constantly streaming in and out of the Hall's main doors. "Anyone who's got a spare moment to look up is going to see me; I'm not exactly camouflaged." But no one was looking up, and Lucia had to admit this was the best view she could get of the preparations, now that guards had sealed off the street. "…Calill could at least have stayed to keep me company." 

They had already seen the Begnion guards' protocols for searching the incoming guests for weapons; they were 'thorough' the same way Ilyana was 'occasionally peckish'. That seemed like fantastic news, since they weren't Sagita guards and Fletcher couldn't just have them let the Bow through, but it also meant that he had a plan. When it came to combat, nothing was as irritating as knowing the enemy _had_ a plan without knowing what it was. On top of that, if he could hide the Bow of Falling Stars from the guards, there was a good chance that Lucia wouldn't know it when she saw it, either.

"And I'm talking to myself, which always makes me worry for my sanity. A little more unhinged and I could end up like Calill." She shuddered the thought off and refocused on the swarming attendants. They carried decorations, endless bouquets of flowers, holy books to be read during the ceremony, a six-foot ice sculpture of a Pegasus, the musical instruments for the orchestra–

"Oh, dear goddess," Lucia breathed, because so much time around the fiery sage had taught her how to think like a stark raving madman if the need arose. All she had to do was scheme like Fletcher and the awesomely destructive weapon in the servant's hands became completely obvious.

The soldier behind her didn't say "Now, what's someone like you up to in a place like this?" because he was actually very good at his job. He simply struck sharply with his knuckles, once on Lucia's temple and once on her fingers, and in her disorientation she let go and toppled off the edge of the roof. Once she was gone, he did say "Rather a shame, but there you go," because he was only slightly evil. Also, he didn't have time for a longer speech, because it was time for Fletcher to take over the world.


	7. Trust and Let Fly

**One-Stringed Harp**

**Chapter Seven: Trust and Let Fly  
**

If she had needed to, as she fell, Lucia would likely have grabbed a passing windowsill for the moment it would take to apply leverage, kicked off the wall, and either attempted to rebound across the street to stall her downward momentum or swung around a lamppost in a mid-air pivot and slid safely to ground level. However, she had just been dealt a stunningly sharp rap to the head, and didn't feel like expending the wasted effort.

Instead, the swordmaster simply allowed herself to plummet onto and into one of the carriages passing by underneath, which were – she could never quite explain this, and forgot to ask later – filled with hundreds of balloons. The impact was exceptionally colourful, punctuated by burst sounds wherever the point of her scabbard jabbed too hard and rather a lot of cursing on the part of the Sagita drivers. The little convoy clattered to a halt without much crashing – apart from the one occupied by Lucia – and the others watched as the door opened and she staggered out in a rainbow tide.

"What in blazes?" Lucia summarised.

From two carts down the line, Boyd and Nephenee watched. "Think we help 'er?" the halberdier asked.

"Somehow I doubt this was part of the backup plan," said Boyd. "We've got our job; let's hold off."

Rather a lot more soldiers had arrived from down the street, proper Begnion holy guard this time, and they had quickly got to the main point of the matter, which was at the end of Lucia's blade and could be used to run people through. Their argument was brief, heated, and seemed to involve concert soloists for some reason, but the guards quickly decided that anything suspicious was, if not criminal, at least not allowed, and a small contingent of soldiers marched her away down a side street. In deference to their foolishness, rather than malice, Lucia refrained from bisecting the lot of them and getting back to business.

"Weird," Nephenee observed.

"Very. Let's hope that wasn't something going wrong. …Hey, there's the Hall of Heroes."

* * *

The largest room within the Hall was, technically, the foyer, which was big enough to hold any sort of fantastically extravagant ceremony, duelling concert orchestras, an entire open-air market, or a small war. Every noble and attendant entering now was aware that it would be used for the first option today; very few knew that the last was also on the schedule, and the most aware was Fletcher Sagita, wearing the neatest finery available to the Begnion elite. 

He stood at the end far from the doors, ahead of the assembling crowd, apparently taking in the incredible majesty of the ornamented relief and mural that formed the near wall, which portrayed the heroes of the goddess standing in her light and countless less-famous protectors of the nation behind them. To be honest, he found the sight boring after all the times he had seen it before, and was much more intent on the dais and throne newly placed beneath the towering figures. The wood and gold gleamed equally; it was a seat fit for the Apostle. Quietly and free of fanfare, she arrived through a side door, followed by a handful of her handmaidens.

"Fletcher," said Sanaki, nodding as she took her seat.

"Lady Apostle," Fletcher acknowledged, bowing deeply. "You honour us." His smile was completely genuine, but didn't come from any of the reasons an observer might have guessed.

"I could hardly be absent," she insisted. "Indeed, it seems that the entire aristocracy agrees with me."

"I would think they always do," Fletcher replied. _That's certainly something I'm looking forward to_, he added inside his own head. Sanaki's eyes seemed to flash when she smiled at his spoken remark, and Fletcher got the unsettling feeling that she was listening to his thoughts, too. For a child, she made an imposing leader.

"The Hall has been decorated magnificently," the Apostle noted, "but I especially enjoy your choice of music." They glanced at the quarter-orchestra at the side of the hall, playing something light and melodious as the nobles arranged themselves in the audience.

"I would say it's even unexpectedly good," said Fletcher, frowning for an instant as he watched the players. There was famously little written for the harp, and so it wouldn't have been strange for no one to have been playing it at all, but the harper insisted he had rarely heard such a harmonious instrument.

Sanaki grinned with an unexpected dash of mischief. "I could listen to such song all day, but I dare say your nerves would wear out before then. Will we be waiting long?"

"I'm not at all concerned, Your Holiness. Lady Astrid would not miss today if lives hung in the balance."

* * *

Considering how richly each one of them lived, there were an astonishing number of nobles in Begnion, and in Gatrie's rough calculation, every single one of them was standing within two inches of him. He had never seen aristocracy act like this before; word had quickly spread through the crowd – carried by hired foot messengers rather than whispering, because these were nobles – that Sagita had over-invited, and there wouldn't be enough room inside for everyone. 

Once united by marriage, Sagita and Ceffylau would represent the most powerful force in the country, save for Sanaki herself. Everyone wants to be friends with a superpower, and so now there was an incredible pressure to be the first inside the Hall. The only reason no one was actually shoving was that each lord or lady was protected by a defensive buffer of servants, although these were bouncing off each other relatively frequently.

However, there is a certain type of person drawn to the profession of armoured knightship, and only a particular class of these people achieve fame and power enough to be called generals. This type of person is technically classified as 'huge', and Gatrie and Hail qualified. Towering over the rest of the crowd, they strode confidently through the sea, and it didn't hurt – aside from a twinge in Gatrie, whose guilt had been working overdrive for days already – that the nobility had a tendency to recoil sharply when they saw her Brand, or realised that the face-painted, hulk behind her was doubtless a laguz. His cloak billowed like a blood-red sail.

"Duke Taramount, formerly of Gallia, present for the wedding of beorc lords," said Hail to the Sagita attendant, who blanched.

"Ah… do you have your invitation?"

"Why should he need it? _You_ invited _us_," she countered impatiently.

"For the, for the sake of official record and conf-f-firmation," he stammered.

Gatrie leaned forward. The hood of his cloak hung back slightly, making the painted lines across his cheeks more noticeable, as well as the new red blaze of his hair. "I am present," he said deeply, mimicking Mordecai's accent. "This is 'confirmation'."

It would be unfair to call the attendant spineless for letting them in. Sanaki had made it clear in recent times that she would no longer tolerate the exclusion of laguz from Begnion society, nor their secret slavery, and wanted diplomatic relations with Gallia to approach friendship instead of hostile disregard. He also had a very strong allergy to having his face clawed off. _Besides_, he thought, _the beastmen don't like chairs, so no one can complain he's taking their seat._

Gatrie and Hail surveyed the scene, which consisted of the heads of a lots of aristocrats and every level surface covered in lace. "This place would be nice without so many tacky decorations. You know. Understated and formal," Gatrie said in a low voice.

"Understated? Those are fifty-foot statues of heaven-blessed heroes over there," Hail murmured back.

"You haven't seen much of the rest of Sienne, have you?" he asked rhetorically. "The Apostle's palace, maybe? The gold is gilded."

"I've only been to the… less-travelled parts of Mainal Cathedral."

"What am I missing?" asked Gatrie's cloak, from around chest-level. Mia had tried to get in legitimately, but discovered at the door that her invitation had been revoked, and then got driven to the back of the crowd with torrential speed. She didn't care for Plan B in the slightest.

"A perfectly ordinary garish spectacle of a noble wedding," Hail replied, her suspicion of Gatrie's story rising again. "What happened to the assassination attempt you warned of? Look, there's Sagita talking to the Empress at the far end."

"Right," said Gatrie. He stretched his arms and shifted so that Mia was revealed, like an actor as the stage curtains rise, and rubbed a fist in his palm, anticipating the savage thrashing to come. "Go see if you can get a slice of cake before the chaos starts."

"I haven't seen the slightest confirmation that there's going to _be_ chaos yet," Hail protested.

"Weren't you listening? I _am_ confirmation."

It's hard to say what would have happened if Gatrie had been slightly quicker. A few seconds' haste here or there throughout the day could add up, maybe giving him the extra minute he would need to force his way through the crowd and deliver to Fletcher the express-courier beating he had been carrying for days. Instead, he was only just beginning to wade into the nobles when Astrid arrived.

She did so impressively, appearing from one side of the hall with a regiment of retainers around her, most of them Sagita servants. Following in the entourage were several of her family, including Lord and Lady Ceffylau, whose attempts to look overjoyed weren't very convincing. The sun blazed through the high windows of the hall, illuminating her in a flare of white. Fletcher gestured, and the music stopped – except for the softly echoing song of the harp – as she approached.

The end of the music was a signal, and the hall's main doors closed, despite the crowded nobles still outside. Their protests were completely shut out by the heavy wood, and no one inside heard the further demands for answers when one of the Sagita attendants cast down a runic stone at the archway and it burst into an impenetrable light barrier.

"In retrospect, maybe we should have already moved," said Boyd, once he recognised the sudden glow from the door. "Bloody hell, we just got _really_ locked out."

Nephenee glanced around the street and realised the tactical position that Fletcher had built. Begnion guards formed a perimeter at the end of the city blocks in all directions, making sure that no one came within a thousand paces of the Apostle while heavily armed. That didn't help much, because the Sagita guards standing around the great hall didn't need to be heavily armed.

The long daggers they were now producing from boots and sleeves were plenty to keep hostage several dozen helpless aristocrats. The commotion around the hall turned from argument to terror and panic, and the Begnion guards were good enough to know the difference, but Boyd and Nephenee paid no attention to their approach. It was too obvious how events went now – the Sagita guards had no chance in combat with lance-wielding soldiers, but the soldiers couldn't get anywhere near the hall without risking the hostages' lives.

"Soren's brilliant'r than we give 'im credit for," said Nephenee. "Think we'd best try getting' in?"

"How, climb the walls? Come on, walk back to the carriages and look like you forgot your stiletto."

* * *

Astrid's slow procession stopped beside Fletcher, who smiled widely. Behind her, the attendants stood much closer to her parents than they needed to for any friendly reason. The Apostle didn't seem to be paying attention; she was transfixed by the tireless harper. Fletcher's joviality faltered slightly as he tried to get Sanaki's attention. "The bishop, Your Holiness?" 

"He will arrive momentarily, Lord Sagita. I confess myself astonished by the nature of this music. Even the instrument seems very familiar," she noted.

Fletcher's smile was entirely too brittle now. He did so hate the child. Imperceptibly, he turned toward Astrid. "Perhaps a minor reorganisation of the order of ceremony? You won't mind, I'm sure." He beckoned the harper, who carelessly threw his instrument into Fletcher's hands.

Astrid's mind was racing. If she didn't kill the Apostle, her parents would die. Thoughtless, self-important people, but innocent of any real crime. She couldn't do that – it was true to say that Fletcher's attendants would kill them, not Astrid, but the semantics were of little use to corpses. If she fired on the Apostle, Fletcher would undoubtedly rise to fill her place; he had the resources, the soldiers, and the superweapon.

If she fired on Fletcher… oh, what a poetically delicious thought. The blast would kill her, of course, unless she could convince him to stand at least thirty feet away, but given the mess that her life had decayed into, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to end it with the destruction of a truly evil man. …Could she? Heroics aside, Astrid hadn't awoken that morning with intent to die, especially by her own hand. The new, already-vanquished Astrid couldn't have done it; she was too weak. If today was the last day of her life, Astrid would die as the soldier she had always strived to be.

If only she trusted herself to be that person now.

She watched, entirely without surprise, as Fletcher flicked the tip of a blade through the harpstrings, severing all of them but the last, gleaming cord, which cut through the blade like a karmic razor. No longer tied into its disguised shape, the wing-shaped harp twisted at its corner and the upper arm reversed, snapping upright, the string taut no matter what length it needed to be. He handed the Bow of Falling Stars to her, with a half-second's meaningful glance at her parents and the assembled nobles.

"What in the world are you doing?" Sanaki demanded, but her voice was flat and grave as her mind quickly pieced together this with the thefts from the reliquary. She knew her history better than most of Begnion, especially when it came to deadly weapons. "Oh, by the goddess…"

"Don't order any heroics, Sanaki," Fletcher growled. From the quiver on his back, he drew a headless arrow, no more than a rod with feathers on the end, and passed that to Astrid as well. It was just a decoration, something appropriate to the house of archers, but to the Bow of Falling Stars, it would serve as well as any other arrow. "Nobles of Begnion!"

"What is this?" someone demanded. "Displaying weapons before the Apostle? Madness!"

"Not merely displaying, but putting to good use as well," said Fletcher. "I will be brief with you all, because quite honestly I have no stirring speech to make. If you all wanted me as emperor, this would have been much more straightforward, I'm sure. Instead, I will say this: here, today, the Empress dies by the hand of House Sagita, and I will be taking the throne. The right to rule will always fall to the one with the power to take it. Once you've served your purpose as hostages, you will be welcome to return peacefully to your homes. Anyone who prefers some sort of confrontation can expect to be blasted to dust and dispersed in the wind."

"You wouldn't dare," said one of the younger nobles. "You haven't got the power to match her."

"I most certainly would," Fletcher replied, as if offended. "And _yes_… we do. Fire."

Astrid raised the bow toward the sky and drew back; just as before, the arrow turned to a blazing line of blue, like lightning hammer into a thin ray. Parts of the crowd drew back, others began to charge forward.

"_Hold!_" Sanaki bellowed, and the hall fell still. "No one approach. I will face you alone, traitor."

"Very honorable of you. I said fire, Astrid."

_…The true warrior goes through phases of understanding,_ she remembered him saying. _First in wielding…_

"Are you waiting for something?"

"She's about to commit sacrilegious regicide, Fletcher, give her a moment," Sanaki remarked.

_Then there is a greater level of knowledge… the shape can change but the essence does not… the warrior becomes his weapon, and the barriers between them are gone… the two acting in perfect harmony..._

There was a face in the crowd.

"You don't have a choice in this matter now, Astrid–" _And only then can you find the strength that you need to–_ "FIRE!"

Astrid let the arrow fly. Sothe was already moving.

The blue flash rocketed through the ceilings and the roof above it, carving a circle through the stone with blinding speed. It was gone, vanishing into the sky, and to watchers outside reappeared just as quickly, falling from the heavens like a star that lost its grip, blasting through stone again, down on the Apostle. But he had leapt, his handmaiden's cloak flying out around him, his crossed daggers a flicker of silver that snapped apart with the relief of a desperately needed breath and a sparkling blue _snap_. Sothe landed on the far side of the Apostle and gladly shook off his cloak. The halves of the slashed arrow skittered away to the corners of the room.

The thief nodded his greetings to Astrid. "We're not done yet, but that was totally another victory dance moment."

Fletcher was blank, as his mind tried to comprehend what he had just witnessed. "That was the single most improbable thing that has ever happened."

Sothe shrugged. "I'm just that good. By the way: hold still." Fletcher stumbled with the first blow Astrid dealt him with the Bow, which bounced satisfactorily off the back of his head, but he twisted under the following strike, wrenched it from her grasp, and rolled her to the floor with a deft sweep. He leapt away from her before she could sweep his legs out, turned the bow toward the Apostle, and plucked the arrowless string.

A sonic boom reverberated in the hall and shook lamps free from the walls; a chord rang out as the air seemed to form a fist and hammer Sothe against the wall. The Apostle's real handmaidens, who had already dropped to avoid harm, slid across the smooth stone floor, but Sanaki stood, her arm stretched forward, hand shaping a sigil in the air, and the gale split around her, merely ruffling her hair.

"What in the world–" Astrid demanded, clambering to her feet, but not approaching Fletcher.

"Not quite as impressive as the star-arrows, but much easier to use," he replied smugly.

"And entirely insufficient if you wish to kill me," Sanaki mocked him.

"Not at all – but I'll need your cooperation now," said Fletcher. "Tell me, girl, how many of your Sainted should I kill before you surrender? I've got quite a supply, so there's no need to rush. This can last all day."

* * *

After the blinding azure streak erupted from and fell upon the Hall, Boyd and Nephenee reached an immediate agreement that there wasn't much point in waiting for another signal. She unscrewed the fasteners and detached one of the carriage's wheels, which the warrior immediately set to using as the bluntest carving instrument in the world. A bit of percussive vehicle maintenance and some tremendously splintered wood later, the standoff between Begnion holy guard and House Sagita soldiers were treated to the bizarre sight of two Sagita-uniformed people rushing up the great Hall's steps, one carrying a door, the other a one-wheeled carriage axle. 

"What have you done to that wagon?!" the senior Sagita lieutenant demanded.

"Improvised," said Boyd, trying to look official with an outlandishly ornamented wooden board under one arm. "Urgent delivery for his lordship and ladyship, sir." Nephenee threw salutes to anything that moved.

The lieutenant looked at the light-barricaded door. "No one's getting inside for a while yet, boy."

"Not _those_ ones," Boyd said, as though the man were ridiculously slow. Without taking his eyes off the soldier, he held the door out sideways, with two blunt-pronged ornaments pointing into the crowd. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Nephenee hammered the axle against the granite steps, snapping off the other wheel, and twirled the pole back up into a lancer's defensive stance. There was a reason this didn't attract many people's attention.

Ike and Elincia gratefully grabbed hold of the apparent ornaments and pulled, drawing out the pair of swords that Boyd had embedded there while the convoy was stopped to be searched. "Steel?" he asked.

"Well, I _would_ have put Ragnell in, boss, but I was afraid of killing everyone within thirty feet," Boyd replied, scowling at him without much intent.

"It'll do."

There is this to be said about the swordsmanship of Lord Ike of Crimea: occasionally, some of his better foes started to see it happen. Generally, the only way of safely viewing Ike in action was to be an innocent bystander behind a nearby brick wall. And the mortar would need to be quite strong. Of course, surrounded by innocent – if frequently objectionable – Begnion nobility meant that he had to restrain himself somewhat. On the plus side, the Sagita guards were distracted enough that he got the element of surprise on them again and again.

Ike immediately ran through the nearest soldier, who he had already marked down as a nasty piece of work, twisted to thrust his boot into another's stomach, hammered down on another with the pommel of his sword, and began forcing nobles behind him with one hand while parrying off oncoming soldiers with the other. Boyd stepped in, door swinging, to take charge of herding aristocrats, which left Ike free to vault into the midst of the Sagita guards and really begin unleashing merry havoc.

Typically enough, several of the guards produced spellbooks and attempted to retreat to a safe casting distance, imagining that Ike's attention would be taken up by the dozen soldiers closing around him. They were less enthusiastic when he parried the first two fireballs with a bat of his blade – silently thanking Stefan for that technique – and downright dismayed when Elincia charged into their ranks, slashing with surgical precision.

Nephenee did her best to assist the queen, but there was only so much more destruction she could add to the royal crusade. Without magic to defend against, Ike had become a whirlwind of steel, and most of the soldiers who were driven within his striking distance once were quick to throw down their weapons and scramble away in retreat.

This had only gone on for a few intense minutes when the Begnion guard finally allowed the others through. Ike was in the midst of using one soldier as leverage to dropkick another and then flinging the first into his comrades, but he was abruptly out of targets; the last few collapsed in a flash of lightning and Soren skipped over them without paying much attention.

"I hope you don't mind being tapped as allies," said the sage. "If we hadn't been desperate–"

"Nonsense," said Ike. "It's invigorating."

"A wonderful change of pace," said Elincia. A mage at her feet began muttering a spell, but it immediately trailed off into a groan when she kicked him. Pointing out that she enjoyed doing so far too much just wasn't the sort of thing you told a queen. "Can you bring down the light barrier?"

"No," said Soren, "but maybe I can speed its decay. I hope we're not missing anything important."

"Now that the boss is here, I'm pretty sure we're going to miss everything except holding coats," Boyd remarked. Nephenee elbowed him lightly. "Okay, yes, I'm glad to see you too."

"I'm glad I don't have to order you," said Ike. "Let's have that door down."

* * *

Sanaki scowled at the treacherous archer. "I hardly intend this as a taunt, but might I suggest that a stiff breeze makes for an ineffective weapon of execution?" 

"Don't tempt me to prove you wrong," Fletcher replied. "And with my guards holding the hall, you're not in any position to tell me what I can't do."

"Very well," she said. "Let me tell you what you _are_ doing. You have revealed your treachery. You stand here now, unable to take steps to kill your foe, emptily threatening the lives of bystanders and wishing that you still had some vague hope of victory, but slowly realising–"

Then a rational thought burst through Fletcher's rage and pointed out the distraction for what it was; he immediately spun in place and struck the bowstring again, blasting a furious wind down the aisle where Gatrie was quietly approaching. Any nobles caught near the edges of the gale were shoved away, falling into each other or over their seats, but Gatrie was trapped in the middle and responded the only way he could. He did nothing. Nothing outward, anyway, save for a slight shift in his footing and extra bend to his stance.

With his eyes closed against the tearing air, he concentrated on the stone under his fingertips, the floor that was built on the foundations that sank into the ground that lay shallow on the surface of the endlessly deep earth. He had worked this kind of mental fortitude before, and it worked, although he didn't know how. Until the singing wind stopped, he focused on nothing but rooting himself to the very core of the world. When it did end, he opened his eyes and smiled; he had only slid back a couple of feet. And, coincidentally, had slipped into a good sprinting position.

Gatrie charged toward Fletcher again, and again the lord unleashed a hurricane force that Gatrie had to halt and weather, but he did weather it as no other soldier could, and charged again. After a third gale he was too close to be deterred, and Fletcher had to leap aside to avoid being crushed under a flying tackle. Fletcher was no trained soldier, but he was quick on his feet, and used Gatrie's relative clumsiness to his advantage. When the general approached next, Fletcher leapt and fired at the floor; the wind splashed outward and blew Gatrie's feet out from under him, while the lordling was merely boosted another foot or two up and away.

Astrid had already taken the opportunity to slip further away from Fletcher in the chaos; she was out of fighting practice and had no wish to rush at him unarmed like Gatrie. Unfortunately, the Hall was mostly quite empty of weapons, especially since Sagita's few armed guards in the hall were attempting to force all the attending nobles into a smaller and more convenient space. There wasn't even banquet cutlery out, which was unlucky, because Astrid had seen the cake and determined that it would take a halberd to cut through.

What she _had_ found were some of the wedding presents, mostly those sent by messenger from far-off nobles. A family crest caught her eye on one of the packages, and she tore it open immediately. Astrid's eldest sister, long since married away, had always been more like her than the rest of their family, and sending something in recognition of their best shared hobby would be just like her. Astrid withdrew the object curiously. Diamonds were set into the handle, which was more than a little bizarre, and tremendously uncomfortable. Still, Titania had given her some training with weapons of an axe-shaped nature, and this more-or-less fit the name…

Trying to rub the dull agony out of his head, Sothe stumbled upright and tried to measure the fight. At close range, Gatrie was turning out to be a trickier target than Fletcher expected. He was relentless, but surprisingly good at twisting out of the way whenever the Bow spat out one of its melodious shockwaves. The two were keeping each other busy, and none of the Sagita servants were going to kill hostages until it was very, very clear to them that the Apostle wouldn't last long enough to order their fiery executions. It was exactly the sort of stalemate he hated; thieves did not do slugging matches.

"Shouldn't you be incinerating him in holy fire?" Sothe asked the Apostle, nodding at Fletcher.

"Only too gladly, but I did not bring the sacred scrolls of retribution to a wedding," Sanaki replied.

"Typical mage response. You don't see Gatrie complaining about being unarmed–" said Sothe, and then one of Fletcher's random missed shots hit them, echoing like a dozen exploding pianos. The Apostle protected herself again, but Sothe was out of her range and did something like an involuntary backwards somersault, landing on his wounded chest and cringing again. So far, getting up was proving to be a losing strategy in life.

At last Fletcher caught Gatrie distracted, hitting him dead-centre with a sonic boom, and the unprepared general was sent sprawling. Fletcher sighed in relief, but kept the Bow trained on him and drew one of the headless arrows. "I'd be obliged if you'd give me your name before I kill you. Not that I'm willing to wait, but it'll take a moment to line up a fatal shot like this. I'm thinking the eye is probably the best bet."

"You don't even know who I am?" the general demanded. "You're making too many enemies, Fletcher. It's not even safe to turn your back anymore." Because Astrid's sense of stealth and timing was still better than Gatrie's, Fletcher only had a half-second's eye-widening realisation before she clocked him over the head with a gilt-edged tennis racket. The next few strikes came in from the sides, and Fletcher rolled with them, trying to get out of her range and keep his eyes on everyone at once.

"Just sit down and take your smiting, you twisted freak!" Astrid bellowed, which was possibly the least-like-her sentence she had ever uttered. Battered, bruised, and leaning heavily against the Apostle's throne, Sothe grinned. At least some good had come out of this mess.

"Do you suppose I could get some _reinforcements_, people?" Fletcher called to his servants. One of them ventured out across the storm-ravaged floor to unlock the access to another side room, and a stream of lightly armed and armoured Sagita soldiers poured out of it. They kept pouring right across the hall and through the far door, because, at the end of the file of soldiers, Calill, Marcia, Geoffrey, Bastian, and a contingent of Crimean royal guards were pursuing them with violent intent. The whole procession took less than half a minute to clear through and out of sight, and when they were gone, the main doors of the Hall had swung open.

"It's amazing what you can do with a Pegasus, a willingness to break a couple of fourth-floor windows, and the deep desire to cause harm to bad people," said Soren, walking in with the others.

"I'm Ike," said (predictably) Ike, his gaze sweeping the crowd. "Yes, I'm a lord of Crimea, and no, I don't have a surname. I'll save you the trouble and add yes, I'm _that_ Ike, so everybody drop your weapons or I will personally mess you the hell up." The clatter of hostage-taking blades echoed off the stone arches of the hall.

Fletcher just shook his head. "This is ridiculous."

"What can I say?" asked Soren. He laughed, and quite accidentally visions of vengeful storms and the eternal suffering of dark judgment swirled around him in most peoples' minds. "You're not the only one with a private army and superweapons."

"I think he just called you a superweapon," Elincia whispered to Ike.

"Aye," Ike agreed. "Maybe _that_ could be my surname."

"Fletcher, give up," said Astrid, and there was sincere pleading in her voice. "No one has to die today." The hall waited in silence. The archer-lord heaved a slow sigh. At last, he spoke.

"Maybe you're–" Fletcher spun and shoved out with surprisingly effective kick that caught Astrid in the stomach and sent her to the floor, hammered Gatrie with another air-cannon, and before the newcomers could take a half-dozen steps he had drawn three arrows and nocked them. Everyone skidded to a halt very quickly, because the trio of arrows were pointed skyward and had just flared into humming blue lines.

"Three?" Gatrie scoffed. "That's a trick shot; you can't aim like that…"

"He doesn't need to," Astrid muttered under her breath. In the deathly quiet, he heard her anyway.

"You're right," said Fletcher. "If anyone gives me cause to let go, for any reason, this hall and everyone within gets to perish in a storm of fire, stone, and celestial might. _UNDERSTOOD?!_" His fingers twitched, and the multitude cringed. "Good. Everyone leaves. Now. Except for the Apostle. Then she dies, the throne passes to me, and anyone who wishes to file a protest may do so from the afterlife."

"You said you couldn't use it!" Astrid snapped at him, an edge of panic in her voice. "What was all that for, otherwise? You said you didn't trust, or… or _something_."

"I honestly couldn't," said Fletcher. He was tired; his fingers shook slightly holding the bow drawn. "But one thing I know is that the power to succeed will always come to those who need it. And I do believe in power. I trust my own intent. And the Bow is both of these things: nothing more or less than an instrument to impose my will on the world. It is mine, and with it I claim all of Begnion for House Sagita."

"How dare you bring down that name with you?" The voice seemed to come from everywhere. Fletcher whirled about in a circle, but no one was sneaking up behind him, nor from any other angle. Distantly, subtly, the Apostle smiled and waited. "How _dare_ you?" the voice repeated. Fletcher began to panic, but it only lasted for a moment.

Then Hayley hit him, feet-first, meteoritic, because the battle had carried Fletcher to the point immediately under the hole Astrid blasted through the upper floors when she fired on the Apostle. The force of impact alone floored Fletcher, but Hayley gave him no chance to resist, slamming his knuckles against the stone floor until he let go of the Bow of Falling Stars. Somewhere in the tangled brawl he had let go of the arrows, but with his stance, form, and concentration broken, their magic blinked out of existence and they rolled away harmlessly.

The same could not be said for the woman now pinning Fletcher's arms to the floor with her knees and subduing him with a hammering rain of fists. It was a surprisingly brief burst of thrashing, and at the end Fletcher was still conscious, although he probably wished otherwise. His eyes focused first on his assailant from above, and then on the Bow in Astrid's hands.

"Whoever you are, you have my thanks," said Astrid. "Now get up so I can finish this for certain."

"No," said the general. "I'll take charge of him. He's my responsibility."

"What's that mean?" asked Gatrie, frowning.

"Hayley Sagita, good of you to join us," said the Apostle, and she laughed at Gatrie's shocked recoil. Hail looked down at Fletcher, gave him one last backhanded slap, and rose to her feet to salute the empress properly. "And I might add you've done extremely well for your first mission."

Hayley's mouth worked in silent consternation for a moment. Eventually she blurted "Your Holiness, no one told me my brother was the one masterminding all of this."

The Apostle looked, if possible, even more amused. "If _I_ had known, do you think I'd have been here today? All told, I would say this worked out better than we could have hoped." She surveyed the destruction throughout the Hall of Heroes. "Well… close to it."

"You didn't tell me you were his brother!" Gatrie blurted.

"Well... half-brother, obviously. Anyway, you were already disbelieving me about being an agent of the Apostle; why would I make life harder on myself for nothing?" She returned the general's glare. "So now you're going to be suspicious about it anyway? I told you the truth; I ran away from home when I was eleven and a senator found out I was half-laguz."

Gatrie opened his mouth to protest, but the Apostle pre-empted him. "Her claim is true, sir knight, and trust me when I say I would be the first to know otherwise. As a matter of fact, given today's events, I believe I'll be instating you as immediate heir to House Sagita."

"_Heir_?" Hayley repeated. "What about my brother?"

"Execution is quite clearly outlined as the fate of traitors to the Begnion theocracy," said Sanaki.

The elder Sagita sibling didn't seem to have noticed that the entire hall was watching her shake her head. "No. I may not know what you intend by giving me my House back, but if that is your command, then I will take charge of all of it, including Fletcher."

Sanaki stared wide-eyed, then laughed. "You would dare argue with _me_ in the same breath that I make you a noblewoman? I can see Sagita's future is going to make for delightful entertainment."

"What can I say, Your Holiness?" She glanced at Gatrie, who was still not hiding his bafflement. "I'm a knight. Standing firm is something of a specialty."

* * *

Lucia arrived at a sprint, skipping over the gale-rent ruins of the main doors paying them any heed. "I saw that flash from across the city – do you have any idea how many soldiers are on the street out there? What did I miss?" 

"Everything," Calill reported.

"Blast!"

"Don't remind me."

"What?"

"Never mind. It's been an atrociously windy day. I'll make appointments for both of us at the hot spring spa, and maybe we can do something about your hair," said the sage.

"You're talking crazy again; I take it that means this ordeal is over?" the swordmaster asked.

"That depends," Calill observed. "Fletcher isn't dead yet, and I have to admit that's irritating me rather a lot. On the other hand, Soren's gone off to raid a library; he says he's got an idea for how to destroy the Bow properly this time. None of this divide-the-pieces-and-hide-them-where-they'll-never-be-found wishy-washiness."

"Good goddess, Fletcher's alive, the Bow is intact, and I can't see the Apostle anywhere – did we win or not?" Lucia exclaimed. Calill grinned slyly and spun a lock of her hair around her finger.

"Her Worshipfultacularness is fine. As for winning, well: in the ways that count, that remains to be seen."

* * *

Time passed; Sothe wasn't sure how much, since he spent most of it feeling like he had been shoved through a pasta press. At Ike's command, the rest of the former mercenaries spread out through the Hall to capture and pacify the remaining Sagita guards, most of whom were unwilling to recognise Hayley as having the slightest authority to issue orders. Some of the nobles dispersed, while others gathered in clusters here and there around the periphery of the main hall. House Sagita was unstable now, which meant life had become interesting for the politicians again, and if such matters needed discussing anyway, there was no sense in letting a small banquet go to waste. Sothe spared a moment of his time to direct a general hatred at the lot of them, and then got back to aching. 

Eventually Elincia arrived with a Mend staff in hand, insisting that she had gone looking for one at her first opportunity, and to be fair she did put it to extraordinarily good use. Certain that he was coherent enough to remember it now, the Apostle thanked him before sweeping away with Hayley to discuss her coming ascension. Vaguely, the thief wondered if this made him some kind of minor saint.

That thought didn't last any longer than it took him to notice that Astrid was standing nearby, still in her ultra-simple-if-elegant white dress, still holding the Bow of Falling Stars like it might slither away. He could see the pained concern in her eyes, and struggled to show no emotion himself.

"You were incredible," she said.

"That reminds me, I need a good place to do a victory dance…" Sothe muttered.

"Why did you come back?"

"Are you really going to ask that?" the thief retorted.

"Well… I suppose I hoped it was because you wanted to say something. Or ask me something."

He frowned. She had said that rather meaningfully. "Is there a reason you're still wearing that dress? You do realise you've bled on it a little." Astrid looked away. "You _do_ mean that, don't you? Astrid…" he said, his voice dropping as he approached her, "I didn't come back to ask you to marry me."

"I – that's entirely –" she stuttered, colour rising in her face. Sothe took the paladin by her shoulders and gently spun her around to face across the hall.

"You are a tiny bit insane and I'm going to explain how. See Boyd and Nephenee over there? They had to split up to flank the last holdout soldiers. Now, even I can't hear them from this far away, but it's not hard to guess from the motions: he's asking if she's okay, that laugh is a yes, the poke in his chest is because she's letting him know exactly what she thinks of overprotectiveness, he's pointing out that he asked her to lead the attack, she's teasing him about Ashera-knows-what…"

And then Boyd literally lifted the halberdier off the floor in his embrace, to the surprise of Astrid and everyone close enough to hear the two of them, which was everyone. "Apparently things have changed while I wasn't looking," Astrid remarked absently.

"_That_ is normal," said Sothe. "Not arrangements made by your parents, not marriages to strangers you've known for three days, and not having little wars break out over your personal decisions. That's why I don't trust nobles; even you have absolutely no idea what 'normal' really means."

"So why _did_ you come back?" Astrid repeated.

Sothe looked her in the eye and whispered: "Because I love you."

"You know," Gatrie said loudly, marching toward them in heroic fashion, "this whole thing happened because of me. In case you were wondering. I mean, Calill and Lucia apparently had some kind of plan going, but if I hadn't known that this wedding needed stopping, we'd all be pretty well knee deep in 'we're screwed' right about now. I'm just saying."

Astrid laughed and stood on her toes to plant a quick kiss on his cheek. "Thank you, Gatrie. The whole country should thank you, but since your brilliant intervention kept me from becoming the new wicked empress, I can't decree it."

The general rubbed his cheek and surveyed the two of them with a discerning eye. "Yup, typical," he determined. "Well, one of these days my karma will balance out and I'll be made Duke of Tellius or something. Hey, is that Marcia? She's wearing her hair longer these days." Gatrie waved the two of them off with something resembling a salute and ambled toward the Pegasus knight, a smile already spreading on his face.

"What in the world goes on inside that head?" Astrid wondered.

"I wouldn't want to know," Sothe said with certainty. "Look, I still have someone I need to find, and Daein is the only place left to look on the whole continent. So I'm not staying here in Sienne, and you'll have to decide what you want to make of that."

"Are you coming back?" Astrid asked.

"…If I said 'count on it'?"

"Then I don't care where you're going," she replied. "In fact, I was thinking about asking Ike if the Crimean Guard could use another paladin for a few months. Anything to get out of Begnion."

"Well. No sense in rushing anywhere," Sothe said, without quite as much cool smoothness as he usually projected. "I don't have to leave _now_. Besides–" he took her hand and slipped into a dramatic pose– "I have at least one victory dance to catch up on."

"The orchestra scattered some time ago," Astrid pointed out.

"Music calls for dance; dance calls for music. They'll be back. Or I don't care. Either one. Thief rules." The paladin laughed and twirled into motion.

* * *

**Endnote** : At long last - I've been planning parts of this last chapter for, what, a year - One-Stringed Harp comes to a close. There are a handful of loose ends, like the tea-ninja and the actual destruction of the Bow and the explanation of how Hayley got her laguz blood and subsequent Brand, and they actually do have explanations, but this is where the story ends. Most things don't tie up neatly at the end, because most things don't actually end; if you think there could or should be more following this chapter, then I've succeeded. If you don't, uh... well, I don't care. Thief rules. 

The next postings by me ought to be, as stated before, the end of **Cascade **(an FE8 story and sequel to **Symmetry**, which is some of my best and favourite work) and a shorter one set between chapters 16 and 17 of FE9, titled **Fever Dreams**, in which Ike gets infected by a demon-plant growing in the dead Serenes Forest and wanders through a hostile dreamscape while the mercenaries work to find the cure. Soren sings about FE10 spoilers. Seriously.


End file.
